Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast may be sentimental, may even be insufferably cute, but it does stick to the old tale as most of us know it. A sweet girl who adores her newly impoverished father agrees to help him to avoid punishment and possibly death at the hands of the monster whose rose he has stolen. Beauty pops off to Beast’s castle, gives him a crash course in etiquette, learns to love and eventually agrees to marry him: whereupon he transmutes into the handsome prince he was before his spoilt stupidities got him demoted to an ugly animal.

But this isn’t the case in Mike Kenny’s version of the story. It’s Katie Matthews’s Beauty who is spoilt and must change. Far from sympathising with her father’s financial woes, she complains about the “poky” house they inhabit, bursts into tears at the prospect of toil and, when she decides that the cook is her fairy godmother, says such things as “get me a beautiful dress” and “bring me a prince”.

In other words she’s a very modern figure, a brattish teenager. This is, I suppose, a corrective to traditional mawkishness but its inbuilt didacticism is all too obvious. Nor does it make narrative sense. I couldn’t understand why such a selfish kid would agree to incarceration in a scary castle nor how and why she sheds her old ways while she’s in the company of Dominic Gately’s Beast, a goofball who disgusts her by slurping his food like an enthusiastic pig.

Anyway, Beauty is a new girl after she returns to her father’s house. She shares the cleaning duties, and declares that she, not Beast, is the ugly one. In other words, Kenny stands the story on its head, which is a position that curdles its brain. Even the Beast isn’t a camouflaged princeling but someone a lot less, well, elitist.

Gail McIntyre’s well-acted production has the simplicity and imagination to provide a good theatrical lesson for any child. It’s the moral lesson that bothered me. Should the old story become a right-minded homily about being considerate and helping with the kitchen chores? Today’s kids can hear all that at home.

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