What's out there?" asks Belle fearfully, as she awakes from a storm-tossed nightmare."London is out there," declares her elder sister cheerfully, opening the imaginary windows so the room fills with the jolly sounds of the streets. But there are other, nastier things lurking out there in Charles Way's imaginative retelling of this classic tale - and Belle is right to be afraid, although she would do well to curb her irrational fear of spiders.
Soon Belle's nightmares and visions are coming true, her father's ships are lost at sea and the family has decamped to the Devon moors where the Beast roams at night, doing very beastly things. Way's vision, like that of Belle, is pretty dark. There is not a singing teacup to be seen or heard, thank heavens. Instead, there is a touch of Jane Austen about bookish Belle, who happens to have a jealous sister called Cassandra, who happens to have a suitor called Mr Knightley (although he is all sensibility and no sense). Later he pops up as the put-upon family retainer, like something out of Cold Comfort Farm. Ah, gothic romance.
All this, of course, is for the adults (or the more widely read of the eight-year-olds in the audience). But there is plenty for everyone in Tony Graham's production. This is nearly a fantastic evening, characterised by the kind of simple miracles of stagecraft that make Graham a first-rate director. If it doesn't quite come off, it is because of its ambition and because the script slightly overreaches itself in its own cleverness, particularly in the development of the housekeeper/mother figure. The storytelling never quite regains the impetus it has prior to the interval, and the feebly amplified Beast is never as sufficiently terrible or attractive as he must be if we are to understand Belle's fear and attraction. But there are enough good things here to make this the thinking family's alternative the panto.
· Until January 12. Box office: 020-7269 1606.
