Beauty and the Beast

The daughter of a wealthy Glasgow merchant, Beauty dreams of unleashing the wild within herself, throwing aside the social conventions that mark her class and experiencing something altogether more primitive.

When her father steals a rose from the garden of a hideous beast, the trader is forced to make a crushing deal, promising to send his daughter to the creature in exchange for his life. Feeling honour bound, young Beauty agrees to the bargain and finds herself in the thrawl of Cora, a beautiful enchantress who transformed her suitor into an animal when he refused to take her hand in marriage.

Haunted by the same spirits that chilled the Christmases of Dickensian literature, Philip Whitcomb’s design is breathtakingly beautiful - a highlight not just of the season but of the year. It captures the decaying grandeur of the British Empire in the Regency period, all dusty grey foot servants and gaudily enamelled mirrors.

Part Universal horror film, part Gothic Victorian literature, it is something both cinematic and nightmarish.

Gemma McElhinney’s Beauty excels in her unwillingness to be a pantomime damsel. Impassioned and courageous, her strength propels the role to a height it seldom attains. Her Celtic lilt lends itself wonderfully to the cello and clarinet of Claire McKenzie’s excellent original music, lending a Scottish folk feel to La Belle est La Bete.

As the wicked witch of the piece, Josephine Warren is totally possessing, swaggering around the stage with an elegant confidence and desperate vulnerability. Her vocally perfect performance is mesmerising, seductive and deliciously villainous.

At times the performance stretches itself an inch or two too far to be the pantomime that it's not. Whilst this comfortably breaks the drama for its younger audience, the gags are not always successful. As witty and informed as they are, the script’s puns on Polonious’s “Neither a lender nor a borrower be” speech are pleasing in context but rather flat in action.

Despite this minor point, the Citizens Theatre has, once again, created something very special, a production red in tooth and claw that sets the heart both fluttering and racing. Gloriously lit by Colin Greenfell, visceral in its design and aurally rich, Beauty and the Beast is more than just another pantomime of comic faces in gooey gowns.

This is a feast for anyone who wants more from a Christmas show than a handful of caught sweets.