The Little Angel Theatre came back from the brink of financial disaster last year and happily can now continue its work as a centre for puppetry, a form that has at last been recognised as being not just for children. There is something rather magical about this theatre, a converted temperance hall tucked away down a back street in Islington. You feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland as you pass through the narrow doorway to enter a world where everything feels miniature.
This exquisitely beautiful new marionette version of Beauty and the Beast doesn't represent the cutting edge of the Little Angel's work. But with its midnight-blue skies, golden crescent moon and wooden marionettes made more than 20 years ago by the late Derek Francis, it is lovely to look at and strong on atmosphere. If the show feels a little quaint, that is part of its charm and makes it particularly suitable for the younger members of the family.
There are some good ideas here: the show is framed by a young girl in a Victorian drawing room who is putting on her own version of the story in her toy theatre. But the action shifts to the main marionette stage as if the child's imagination has burst at the seams and cannot encompass the story in her little theatre. These shifts in perspective between the toy theatre and the marionette are always interesting, as is the tension between the actors and the marionettes. It is curious how, in some circumstances, inanimate wooden puppets seem more intensely human than human beings.
Initially we don't see the beast at all, suggesting that we most fear what we cannot see, and there is a nice comic touch with the family cat that is part of both the fairy-tale and real worlds. Unfortunately some of these bonuses are destroyed by a script that is often stilted. Puppet theatre makes demands on the playwright different from those of conventional theatre, but as in any other kind of theatre you need a first-rate script to produce a first-rate show.
· Until January 26. Box office: 020-7226 1787.
