ABSTRACT
Corn Exchange Newbury (CEN) is a medium-sized theatre venue in the south of England. Like many such venues, it has a tradition of staging a pantomime for the Christmas season. In 2017–2018, it offered Beauty and the Beast. First published in France in 1740 as La Belle et la Bête, the tale reflects the myth of Cupid and Psyche, though da Silva and Tehrani (2016) argue that its roots may go back at least 4,000 years. Indeed, as Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson sing in their pop duet, Beauty and the Beast, it’s a “Tale as old as time, True as it can be” (Wikipedia n.d). As a parallel, the ‘story’ of autism and Asperger syndrome may be attributed to the work of Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger in the early 1940s (Silberman 2015), though one may assume that autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) are also ‘as old as time.’
