Theatre / Reviews
Review: Living Spit’s Beauty & The Beast, Bristol Old Vic
“Look, there’s an audience!” exclaims Howard Coggins from the stage of the Bristol Old Vic on Saturday evening as Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast prepares to be both simultaneously livestreamed and performed in front of real life people.
Beauty and the Beast is rollickingly good fun, but the most extraordinary thing about it is not Coggins’ monobrow or Stu McLoughlin’s Mariah Carey-esque vocal range. It’s that it is even happening at all.
Like theatrical blackjack players, this production gambled that Bristol would be put in tier two (something that even our city’s mayor didn’t think would happen) so when we were, the show was ready to start.
is needed now More than ever
While Coggins and McLoughlin take the plaudits on stage, a standing ovation is due every night for everyone who worked so hard to get these two actors on a stage at all.
That this stage is the main auditorium of the Bristol Old Vic feels right for a Clevedon-based duo who have earned their stripes as Living Spit performing everywhere from Somerset pubs to the Edinburgh fringe, and during the pandemic started their own podcast.
Beauty and the Beast first sees our two heroes in a small French village, Le Village de Trois Choux Fleurs Appartement a la Vache de Pompidou to be exact, where McLoughlin as Belle and Coggins her father live with Flaneur the dog.
Belle is the most beautiful girl in the department, or even the region. As well as rhyming abode with commode, this production also makes geopolitical jokes at the expense of our Gallic neighbours.
Having had the third wall broken even before the metaphorical curtain was raised, it continues to be smashed to pieces as Coggins and McLoughlin often stop proceedings to explain what is going on.
McLouglin elaborates on the origins of Stockholm Syndrome as Belle starts to fall in love with Beast at his mysterious yet ostentatious chateau in which she is being kept prisoner, making friends with a candlestick and a mantel clock who Living Spit’s lawyers hope bear no resemblance at all to characters in a famous animated version of this same story.
Among references to everything from Lionel Messi and Frida Kahlo to TikTok dances and Zoom quizzes, I think I even spotted a homage to Banksy’s Mobile Lovers mural which he painted a few years ago in St Jude’s.
At times, proceedings get very panto-esque – this is Christmas after all – with one particularly hilarious scene seeing a WhatsApp conversation between Belle and Beast full of emojis and auto-correct confusion.
After a year mostly devoid of theatre, Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast has arrived like an early Christmas miracle.
Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast is at Bristol Old Vic until January 9 2021. For tickets and more information, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/living-spits-beauty-and-the-beast. The show will also be available on demand via the Bristol Old Vic website.
Main photo: Ben Robins
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