Beauty and the Beast review – imaginative and spine-tingling family fun

Citizens theatre, Glasgow
Lewis Hetherington’s reworking of the 18th-century fable is creepy and creative, serious and scary

It is a rare for a family show to be both funny and spine-tinglingly creepy, but an achievement playwright Lewis Hetherington pulls off in his imaginative reworking of the 18th-century fable. You would expect one to cancel out the other, but here the narrative cracks forward with such certainty, you can afford the odd moment to laugh.

It is funny that Baron Aaron (Tyler Collins) is deep in denial about his failed shipping business; that Beauty (Israela Efomi) carries with her a copy of an etiquette manual called How to Be a Lovely Young Lady; that her sister, Bright (Holly Howden Gilchrist), cares more for inventions than everyday expressions of affection; that the cat and dog (Michael Guest and Martin Donaghy) are falling ever so sweetly in love; and that the housekeeper Mrs Flobberlyboo (Elicia Daly) has a taste for modernist singing that makes the rest of Nikola Kodjabashia’s angular score seem conventional.