The show is created by the same team which revolutionised family theatre at Londons Young Vic in 1994 with Grimm Tales.
These sometimes funny, often gruesome, but always beautifully told, stories have enchanted toddlers to grandmothers for generations.
The tales range from farce to satire, romance to horror and include Beauty and the Beast, the wife-killing Bluebeard, the child-eating mother of The Juniper Tree and the nakedly ambitious Emperor in The Emperors New Clothes.
All eight tales are performed in one evening by the same ensemble of eight performers in eight contrasting settings, drawing from a variety of nations and periods of history.
These range from Toby and the Wolf set mischievously in 1950s communist Czechoslovakia, to Beauty and the Beast set in beautiful Renaissance Italy. These timeless fairy and folk tales are retold by award-winning British poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy.
Duffy's poetry collections include the best-selling The Worlds Wife and Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize.
She has also been awarded an OBE, a CBE and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Creative team
Director and designer Melly Still leads the creative team. Her previously acclaimed work includes the Young Vics Grimm Tales (also with Carol Ann Duffy) and The Jungle Book.
She also designed and co-directed Tales from Ovid and Midnights Children, both for the RSC, and co-devised Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the National Theatre. Music has been composed by Norwegian Terje Isungset, one of Europes most innovative percussionists and composers.
Working mostly with free improvisation and unlikely instruments, his critically acclaimed recordings include Iceman Is, an album recorded using instruments made purely from ice!
The show is also produced in association with the National Theatre of Bergen, Norway. The cast includes Elaine Claxton, a familiar face from TV, perhaps best known for her appearances in Wire in the Blood and Bad Girls.
Bristol Old Vic also welcomes back Howard Coggins, who played Snug the Joiner in David Farrs A Midsummer Nights Dream, along with Zara Ramm and Elliot Levey.
The cast is completed by Bill Nash, Vineeta Rishi, Jack Tarlton and Kelly Williams. Beasts and Beauties runs from April 2nd until May 1st 2004. | 
