THE Grimm brothers’ fairy tale of Beauty And The Beast had a couple of new additions when Lincoln company visited York for one evening of garden picnic theatre this week.

Not only was Milky The Cow taking a panto-style starring role in a show for three to ten-year-olds, but the script by former University of York student Laura Turner had the story being told by a bunch of children on a hot afternoon (we could but imagine on a muggy, overcast Tuesday night) in wartime Forties’ Blighty.

Alongside the Churchill poster on the parish notice board was an impromptu notice for Butey And Beest Today, as the pukka children prepared to fill their day with the one thing that rationing could not constrain: the power of imagination.

Julia (Sophie Morton), Dorothy (Nicky Diss), Rory (J P Berry) and Colin (Scott Bowler) and their perfectly lovely friends Louisa (Georgina Sherrington) and William (Chris Upton) became the Storyteller, Priscilla, bow-tied Stepmother, Beast, Beauty and broad-Yorkshire Father respectively.

From dishing out roles to each other, the children then played out Beauty And The Beast, creating such amusing characters as a talking dress and a speaking clock with a Spanish accent, conjuring the Beast’s head from Dorothy’s latest needle class and improvising a magic carriage from Milky and a pair of twirling umbrella wheels.

Richard Main’s songs were sung in jaunty a cappella mode; the humour was mostly physical and daft, but could have had more verbal punch, while the second half’s energy levels sagged in the middle, before the reviving salts of the romantic Happy Ever After finale.