Simon Periton, Chantal Goulder
La Belle et La Bête
19 July - 29 August
“You are the only master here,” the Beast tells the nervous, kidnapped Belle as she sits at his table, in Jean Cocteau’s dreamy 1946 adaptation La Belle et La Bête. It’s true that her white-blonde hair and her delicate good looks lend her a rare, irresistible power, even as she is imprisoned in the lair of a monster: beauty, with its spellbinding ability to root us to the spot, to induce us to forget all reason and good sense, is in some ways the terrible master of the world. It is a gift once only delivered to the fortunate at birth, and now just as often paid for, worked for, planned for, deceived for, and—finally, if only occasionally—self-abnegated for.
