The Stage

Beauty and the Beast

Published Monday 25 January 2010 at 10:20 by Ian Barge

Pantomime is a major feature of the Courtyard’s theatrical year. The company has established a well-deserved reputation for visual and musical panache, stunning pyrotechnics and spellbinding special effects. Living up to, even exceeding, high expectations seldom seems beyond the reach of its creative commitment and imaginative energy. This season’s Beauty and the Beast is no exception. It is a bold, unusual choice of fairy tale and Lyndsay Maples’ conceptual shaping of the story sends us back to the original with renewed insight - psychological as well as spiritual. The redemptive power of love has seldom been more poignantly explored in panto format. As has become a trademark Courtyard feature, the Gothic elements are brilliantly realised in Les Price’s set designs and Phillip Aiden’s electrifying choreography. Rab Handleigh’s pulsating score soon has the audience as well as the cast shedding inhibitions. Add to this the lyrical richness of much of the singing and plentiful dollops of shameless slapstick and a traffic-stopping show is born. Any critic not moved to superlatives by this Christmas cracker of a performance would be a true Scrooge.

A scene from Beauty and the Beast at the Courtyard Theatre, Hereford Photo: Russell Lewis Photography

Among a host of compelling individual performances, Arabella Rodrigo gives Beauty a spirited, lyrical pathos. Andrew Lindfield’s Beast is as much an athletic as a vocal tour de force, while the familiar yet fresh figure of Nick Smithers deserves a New Year knighthood for his Madame Froufrou piece of panto-damery. The Courtyard glows like a massive magic lantern on a wet, windy Herefordshire evening.