Beauty and the Beast
by David Holman
Magpie Theatre Company, South Australia
Directed by Chris Johnson
Design: Julie Lynch. Music: Alan John.
Cast: Annabel Giles, Sharon LeRay, Claudia LaRose,
Michael Habib, Tom Considine, Tim Aris.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
This is the third Adelaide Festival in which the Magpie Theatre
Company has staged a new work by David Holman. It was the celebrated No Worries in 1984, and in 1986 The Small Poppies. But with Beauty and the Beast it has been third time not-so-lucky for the Magpie/Holman collaboration.
This is largely due to the fact that David Holman has made an
adaptation which has proved to be less than adaptable to an Australian setting. Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s original fairy tale La Belle et La Bete is a quintessentially European work. Or, at least, its nexus is emphatically in a European tradition, a fact which has been emphasised by Jean Cocteau’s immortal film of Beauty and the Beast made in 1946.
Cocteau’s elegant Beast, looking like Sir Philip Sidney with fangs and a face full of steel wool, emanated a genteel eroticism and a weary melancholy. He seemed to epitomize Europe itself, waiting to be revitalised by youth unencumbered by the cobwebs of the past.
Holman has intuited this element and one admires the impulse to
develop it imaginatively. But set in an unspecified Australia of the 19thcentury his fable of the old and new worlds cannot get a proper leverage and it is left revving in neutral.
The clear symmetries of the original story have been retained.
The father, ruined when his ship is lost, looks to his three daughters for support. Two disappoint him with their self-concern while Beauty, the favourite, gives good counsel. When she is asked what she would have him bring back from his travels she
requests a red rose. But when he plucks one from the Beast’s magical garden there is hell to pay – or rather, a life to forfeit.
The father ungallantly allows Beauty to return in his place and the Beast begins to court her with what amounts to a series of impeccable tantrums. In making the family Irish, the Beast a sort of vulpine squatter, and casting young black actress Claudia LaRose as Beauty, Holman and director Chris Johnson have given the play interesting political resonances but they are tentative and only serve to underline the fact that the story is largely resistant to
alteration.
The Beast in the Outback is an historical enigma, classless without
even the cultural trappings of a castle. There is no old order for him to represent and he does not translate to any indigenous framework either. Similarly, the Irishness of the characters is merely picturesque when the play itself has an underdefined
context.
Chris Johnson has directed broadly and the effect is a further
coarsening of what is a subtle text both in the original and in Holman’s recasting. The play is amiably presented but the stage Irish accents and blustery deliveries from some actors make it all a bit more bull and bush than necessary.
Michael Habib is too declamatory as Ryan, the father, but as ever he is an actor with great warmth. Tom Considine gives a better performance than his Darby O’Gill accent might suggest and Sharon LeRay’s dizzy Bernadette and Annabel Giles’ petulant Bridie mostly succeed – although we are quite unprepared,
thematically and psychologically, for their transformation into Goneril and Regan in the final scene of the play.
Claudia LaRose, highly successful in the 1987 Come Out Festival’s
Holman opera Frankie, again gives a touching performance and Tim Aris’ Beast is also carefully observed. Julie Lynch’s design is one of her most assured yet with elegant maritime accoutrements, an expansive streaked and speckled backdrop and effectively used raked stage. The costumes are stylish and the Beast’s mask, in dark brown with almost kangaroo-like features, is splendid.
Alan John’s settings of Irish ballads are haunting and harpist
Moira Lawry rendered them beautifully. This is theatre of high calibre and as always Holman and Johnson honour their young audiences with thoughtful work. But not only does Beauty and the Beast resist transportation to the colonies, it has cramped David Holman’s usually indomitable style as well.
“Beauty and the Beast”, Lowdown, Vol.10, No.2, April/May, 1988, p.80.