Theatre review: Beauty and the Beast

Published on Wednesday 8 December 2010 18:51

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW ****

IF YOU are a theatre lover – a fan of high drama, sweeping spectacle, and fearless emotion – then there's no doubt which Christmas show should be your first choice this year. Alan McHugh's new version of Beauty and the Beast, directed by Guy Hollands on a fabulous grey-and-silver set by Philip Witcomb – all cobwebs and whirling birch forests, with a great, howling moon – is a superb piece of musical theatre, beautiful to look at, magnificently acted, and powerfully sung, to the accompaniment of an unobtrusive live band.

Whether it is, in any real sense, a children's show is open to debate. It not only chooses one of the darkest and sexiest of fairy tales – the story of a male beast redeemed by the love of a pure and brave young girl – but gives it a powerful adult twist, reframing the romance as a jarring love-triangle in which the dominant role is played by Cora, the glamorous live-in witch (or sister, or wife) who has been rejected by the Beast in his days as a prince, and under whose vengeful curse he now lives.

Singing and talking twice as much as any other character, cutting across every conversation between Beauty and the Beast, and constantly on her knees begging for love, Josephine Warren's high-octane Cora commandeers too much attention, despite delicious competing performances from Gemma McElhinney as Beauty, Jim Sturgeon as the Beast, and Jenny Hulse and Mark McDonnell as Beauty's sister and loving old dad. Despite this strange preoccupation, though – and partly because of it – this remains an astonishingly powerful new take on a familiar story, swept up into a seamless and gorgeous piece of theatre; just don't take very young children there, into a dark forest of adult emotion that, with any luck, they won't enter for another 30 years.