REVIEW: Beauty and the Beast at Northern Stage
A new spin on an old favourite
And now, as the Monty Python team used to say, for something completely different…
There’s a big theatre not a million miles away from Northern Stage where you know pretty much what to expect come the festive season. It’s a comedy double act now into its 20th Newcastle panto run.
A successful formula was found and the Theatre Royal has stuck to it. Nothing wrong with tradition at Christmas, even if it’s one you’ve created yourself.
Northern Stage, also a big theatre at this time of year with its epic stage flanked by audiences on both sides, offers a Christmas show rather than a panto (best suited, in any case, to the old proscenium arch theatres).
And it likes to ring the changes.
My pretty long memory takes in The Borrowers, The Wind in the Willows, a brace of Christmas Carols (even before last year’s version of the Dickens tale), various compilations of Grimm Tales, visits to Narnia and Charlie Hardwick as a fabulous Snow Queen.
This year’s telling of Beauty and the Beast by theatrical innovators Katie Mitchell and Lucy Kirkwood (it first surfaced at the National Theatre in 2010) has the familiar story wrapped in another.
So we begin not in a forest but in a garish music hall setting presided over by a domineering fairy compère called Pink (Helena Antoniou) whose uncooperative French assistant, Cécile (Lucy Doig), is a source of constant exasperation.
This pair, in their bright costumes and glittery wigs, add a dash of Eurotrash to the proceedings and go a long way towards stealing the show.
But it’s through them – using some rather beautiful shadow play - that we get to the plot most people will be familiar with, the old French fairy tale in which a slow-burning romance between a ferocious Beast and a girl called Beauty sees the former freed from a bad fairy’s spell and becoming, once more, a handsome prince.
It’s not the most straightforward telling, I have to say, and I do feel it would benefit in the opening scenes from a character to connect with the children in the audience and be their jolly friend and guide.
Win over the kids and the rest will follow.
There is a rabbit character called Rabbit (Newcastle performer Maya Torres who also plays Beauty’s sister, Lettice) who at times dons an elaborate contraption which can reveal people’s innermost thoughts.
This gives us insight into the emotions of young Beauty (Bridget Marumo) as she plots a delicate course, pulled this way and that by her concern for her ailing father (Davey Hopper) and her growing affection for the Beast in whose castle she’s held captive.
After the clamour of the opening scenes, the old story finally gets the chance to work its time-honoured magic, the children becoming absorbed, calling out, and the silences seemingly owing more to suspense than mild mystification.
Bryony Shanahan took on a big challenge, marshalling so many disparate forces in this enormous space, and it comes good in the end with the Beast (and a no doubt relieved Conor McCready) finally freed of his furry guise and scary red eyes which had prompted some infant whimpers in my vicinity.
But for the real end of the show we’re back with the bickering twosome, Cécile finally getting to sing her song, Nobody Loves a Fairy When she’s Forty (it is funny but how many tots went home humming that?) and Pink sensationally exposed.
There’s a lot packed into this particular Christmas cracker but if you like a show with a lot of food for thought and lashings of eccentricity to go with the glamour and glitz, you know where to go.
Beauty and the Beast runs until January 3. Tickets from the Northern Stage website or tel. 0191 2305151.