HOWARD Coggins was a comic genius, a versatile actor with a vivid, surreal imagination, and in their company Living Spit, he and Stu McLoughlin created something uniquely funny, charming, wacky and endlessly entertaining – reinventing history with their two-person take on the lives of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I, telling the story of real life (unintentional) murderer Typhoid Mary, revisiting the Nativity, turning Frankenstein into a musical, and even bringing their own special footwork to Swan Lake.

One of their great triumphs was Beauty and the Beast, mining the centuries-old French fable to create a show that was daft, slightly updated and weirdly true to the spirit of the original. Howard was absurdly touching as the Beast – and for those who saw that show, it was hard to imagine anyone else in the role. But Howard died in 2023, and is still much missed by all who knew him and by Living Spit’s thousands of fans across the West Country.

At the end of last year, Stu brought Beauty and the Beast back, this time with himself as Belle’s father and the Beast, and the hilarious but charming and oddly elegant Harry Humberstone as Belle, in what is described as a monstrously-musical, Disney-defying version of the classic French tale about what it means to be truly beautiful in the 18th century.

The change of cast ensures that this is a very different show – Stu’s Belle was vain and quite arrogant, Harry’s is shy and pretty, gentle but also feisty. Stu’s father is a marvellous combination of self-satisfied success and single parent anxiety – his Beast is grumpy but touching, a creature longing for someone to see beneath the frightening exterior.

The tour came to Sturminster Newton’s Exchange, one of Stu’s favourite venues, he told the capacity audience, who had loved every minute, every silly song, every lavatorial joke, the clever word-play and the dazzlingly fast costume and wig changes.

There are subtly funny nods to the Disney film, with a talking clock and a chattering candlestick, but this is not a pastel sentimental waltz through a fairy story – in its farcical way, it probes real issues of poverty, entitlement and the real meaning of beauty, while never slackening the pace of the jokes and the pantomimic action.

Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast ends its tour at the Tobacco Factory at Bedminster, from 22nd to 24th January.

FC