Beauty and the Beast

Published Wednesday 14 December 2005 at 12:50 by Pat Ashworth

David Bintley’s acclaimed Beauty and the Beast exudes mystery and awe right from its shivery start. The Beast’s castle is a lofty fragment of baroque magnificence. It appears out of the mist like something half-realised, with candelabra that self-ignite, flagons that tilt themselves and an armchair that comes alive to both enfold and imprison the Merchant.

As a Christmas offering this is superb, its dark terrors mitigated with comic scenes such as the magnificent banquet - visually stunning and peopled with greedy guests such as Marian Tait’s malevolent Grandmere. The ritual danced by the Birds of the Air develops a frightening intensity but that too combines with beauty as they raise Belle aloft as though she is flying.

Elisha Willis dances Belle exquisitely, with a serious sensitivity in which nothing is hurried or exaggerated but the tiniest movement tells the story. Her relationship with the Beast develops in tentative sequences of advance and repulsion. Robert Parker captures the Beast’s clumsy tenderness and self-loathing, climaxing in a breast-beating, back-arching solo as he moves towards death.

Ambra Vallo is the capricious and watchful Wild Girl and Victoria Marr and Silvia Jimenez wriggle and flirt delightfully as Belle’s nasty sisters. One highlight is the masked ball with the Court Beasts, who exhibit all the oddities and unpredictability of the inmates of an asylum and scatter at the Beast’s pain. The finale is breathtaking, with radiant light pouring through the archway like a new creation and an ecstatic dance of discovery for Belle and her golden Prince. Rapture.