'Beauty and the Beast' Review
Venue: Rose Theatre, Kingston
Dates: 03 December 2021 - 03 January 2022
Tickets: From £10
OUR VERDICT:
It’s always refreshing to see a familiar tale given a distinctive makeover, as long as it’s done persuasively.
Happily, after a year’s enforced break, the Rose’s annual Christmas production is back in commanding fashion. Writer Ciaran McConville has been the pen behind many of the theatre’s big recent festive successes and whilst this isn’t quite as utterly mesmerising as his Narnia or A Christmas Carol it’s still highly inventive and high-quality festive fare filled with imaginative ingenuity and well complemented by Eamonn O’Dwyer’s musical numbers.
Firstly, this is no conventional Beauty and the Beast.
Forget the romantic fable, the emphasis here is on family, friendship, humanity and personal redemption. Three siblings are sharing an engrossing bedtime story, one in which Bella (Amelia Kinu Muus) is being raised by her father in the town of Villeneuve.
She is cloistered from society, aware of a magical and mysterious rosebush hidden away and bemused by her father’s strange illness which sees plant tendrils sprouting from his hand.
On her 18th birthday, all is revealed and a desperate Bella embarks on a quest to find a cure and locate the elusive Beast who seems to have cursed her father.
Frankie Bradshaw’s beautifully evocative stage set opens in the children’s bedroom, sweeps across Villeneuve and into the mountains where Bella’s journey begins, its magical mirrors which share shards of truth and memory being a particular highlight.
As always the Rose has a first-rate young cast drawn from its youth theatre, who perform alongside professional actors and from this comes Bella’s guide, the well-meaning but dopey Felice ( an excellent Amy Lawrence, from the youth theatre’s Purple Cast.)
Bella’s naivety is balanced by her extensive botanic knowledge and she slowly inches her way towards a happier resolution.
Oliver Senton and Paula James bring back echoes of the unscrupulous Thenardiers from Les Miserables in their portrayal of avaricious couple Rene and Marguerite.
Stanton Wright is a convincing, less grotesque Beast, his form one where Nature has run rampant with plants bursting at every seam and Oliver Senton is effective as Bella’s deluded father whose choice of wealth over love proves his undoing.
Stylishly done, the Rose as ever offers the ideal alternative to traditional panto, with a broadly accessible and very imaginative show, filled with just the right blend of seasonal magic, compassion and redemption.
