BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. To 3 May.

Young People

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
by Madame Leprince de Beaumont adapted by Nick Lane

York Theatre Royal Studio To 3 May 2003
10.30am 1-2 May
11am 19,26 April,3 May
1.30pm 17,22-25,29 April-1 May
2.30pm 19,26 April,3 May
4.30pm 17,24-25 April
Runs 1hr 15min One interval

TICKETS: 01904 623568
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 April

Panto. without Christmas. Without very much at all.Without intending it, I was the audience member from hell, turning up late then being afflicted with a recurrent cough till half-time (just half-an-hour). Sorry.

I don’t apologise if I go on to seem a critic from the same extra-terrestrial location. This show is dire. Putting it on at all should lead to some elementary psychiatry at the theatre concerned. Enticing youngsters to watch it should be a criminal offence. If they have to perpetrate such stuff, they might at least pick on audiences their own size.

Beauty is a dodgy one to stage anyway. Structurally, the amount of to-and-froing limits what can happen at each point, while its authorship points up it’s an artificial confection, tending to type-characters rather than having the strength of a folk-generated narrative.

Not that this production makes any attempt at imaginative involvement. There are vapid songs. There is doggerel rhyme. Of Beauty’s Merchant father entering Beast’s castle: ‘And this, you’ll never need reminding/As he went in, it slammed behind him’. Most of the first line’s there just to fill in and give a rhyme (of sorts). It says nothing that couldn’t be more vividly and economically be provided by acting.

What age does Nicholas (or Nick as the programme variously has it) think he’s aiming at? Who is going to find a comic specs-and-nose plus ridiculous quavering voice believable as Beauty’s dad? When Lane’s playing Beast (as a substandard cousin of Oz’s cowardly Lion) and Amy Thompson dons the party-joke specs, who is going to need her aside to explain she’s being dad now? Why is it assumed the audience is too stupid – or the storytellling so inept – to need such a prompt?

Every technique the piece tries out – puppet, disguise, adaptable scenery – is undercut in patronising triviality. There is neither poetry nor wit. If this is what young people are given as theatre, no wonder so many grow up thinking it’s not for them. This may not be the finest story in the book but it deserves more than to become the pretext for a song about sausages – the most extensive piece of self-congratulatory tripe in this best-forgotteng hour stolen from young peoples’ lives.

Beast/Merchant/Blob/Fairy: Nicholas Lane
Beauty/Ratface/Merchant: Amy Thompson

Director: Nicholas Lane
Designer: Laura McEwen
Lighting: Dominic Bell
Composer/Musical Director: Tristan Parkes

2003-04-17 03:07:43