Written for Culture Wars
Few seasonal offerings for family audiences contain overt espousals of proletariat values. Fewer still have their heroine reject the trappings of feminity, pointedly throwing off fine gowns for the freedom offered by britches. Only Katie Mitchell’s will tinker with the fairytale’s telling to demonstrate the motives behind the narratorial voice.
While I’m all for this breed of smarty-panto, I just wish it wasn’t quite so constrained by its goody-goody attitude.
Much has been made about the improbability of arch-experimentalist Mitchell helming a children’s show. Far more unlikely, in my opinion, would be directors wedded to psychoanalytical realism; Howard Davies, for example, or Michael Grandage. Mitchell’s willingness to explode stories, to leap over the conjunctives, seems an ideal grounding. Uninitiated in the art of suspended disbelief, children can be more at ease with the theatrical self-awareness of onstage storytelling.
Mitchell takes advantage of this by framing Madame de Villeneuve’s fairytale in the musical hall. Leading proceedings, accompanied by a shoe-boxed insect orchestra, is Mr Pink (Justin Salinger), a stilettoed dandy with a whirling bow-tie and a candy-floss suit. (Reservoir Dogs, this is not.) Aided by two browbeaten assistants and a ‘Thought Snatcher’ mind-reading device, Pink controls the telling: pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding to suit the needs of his bitterness.
With this device in place, Mitchell has given herself room for spirited fun. Her camp emcee has licence to run riot, but instead offers a muted presence. For all his strengths, Salinger is not a larger-than-life actor. His charisma rests in subtlety, which is wasted on a clown so far downstage. The barked orders of a bossy-boots seem merely petulant; the turns of a show-off have too much grace. Politeness does not become Mr Pink.
Without hurtling into the gusto and bawdiness of music hall – even aimed at kids – the split becomes unnecessary, disrupting what is, in fact, an elegant and pertly sophisticated main-course.
On Vicki Mortimer’s lush cream set, thorny roses curling up the wall, Mitchell takes real care of both Beauty and Beast. Sian Clifford’s Beauty is more than just a pretty-faced princess in waiting; she is a young woman increasingly torn, between her family and her own life, between immediate contentment and long-term happiness. The slowness with which she thaws, eventually offering a coy hand for Mark Arends’ monster to kiss, is delicate and captivating. As for Arends, he is truly monstrous: an unkempt hairball with a carnivorous jaw and the distorted voice of Legion. His features are nightmarish, echoing the warped bunny of Donnie Darko. Towering over Beauty on stilts, he moves about the stage with a spider’s swiftness and menace. Escape is not an option.
Even when the prince finally oozes out of the carcass, with all the grossness of a sci-fi movie, Arends keeps sight of the beast. His legs remain twisted and inhuman; his hands seem awkward. There is in him the most touching vulnerability. Without self-control, you sense, that gourging, animal horror could return. It is a superb performance, entirely without vanity.
Perhaps that makes sense of Mr Pink, whose frippery and poise (one can easily imagine him being scented) is set against the ragged savagery of the Beast. Such excessive civility is no more befitting of man than its total absence. One wishes that Mitchell had found equal beastliness in Mr Pink. Or else, just let Beauty and her Beast be.
Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey
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