The Cumnor Players go mad in Dorset!

The Cumnor Players are very excited to be presenting our performance of ‘Beauti and the Beast of Lulworth Castle’ to Camp Bestival festival goers in 2012.

Camp Bestival is an award winning  family friendly festival held in the majestic grounds of Lulworth Castle, set against the backdrop of England’s dramatic Jurassic coastline in Dorset. It's packed with live music, theatre performances, and children's entertainment, with full details available from the  Camp Bestival site.

Our story is adapted from our 2011 Pantomime "Beauti and the Beast of Boars Hill" and is now set in Dorset many hundreds of years ago, not long after the Normans had arrived. Merchant Losemore is Beauti’s father and the clue is in his name. Despite his pretensions as an entrepreneur extraordinaire and his penchant for the French-Norman lingo (because they’re the ones in charge), all his business ventures end in failure. His daughter Beauti is forced to meet the Beast to sort out her father’s latest mess. Poor Beauti not only has a feckless father, but also a hapless brother, Tutti, and two mean sisters, Frutti and Cutie. The Dames provide domestic drama with their constant bickering, and are also the source of some laughs with their medieval jokes and joshing.

Although the banking crisis is not very funny for everyone at the moment, it gave us a fund (ha ha) of ideas for why our characters were short of cash, and even what the villains might do for a living. We hope children will enjoy the slapstick comedy and be suitably awestruck by the Beast, a grunting shadowy giant with red flashing eyes. Prepare to boo, laugh and sing, accompanied by our band of talented musicians ‘The Pantones’. The stage-set has been built to look like an open storybook of beautifully illustrated pages so we can quite literally unfold our tale.