Once upon a time the big Christmas draw at the Old Vic was Ian McKellen, who pleased everybody, especially himself, by frolicking gleefully around in preposterous frilly dresses. But this year the prime panto pull is Stephen Fry, not because he’s playing a fairy godmother or mouse footman, but because he’s adapted Cinderella for the more educated kids, the sillier sort of adult and, given what ensues between Buttons and Dandini, London’s good-natured gay world.

The result is clever going on clever-clever and, at times, venturing perilously near clever-clever-clever. Who else would insert the fact that T.S. Eliot is almost a epigram for lavatories, or get Pauline Collins’s fairy to tell Madeleine Worrall’s Cinders that she’s suffering from accidie and pathological inanition? Often one feels that Fry sending up pantos, rather than giving us a panto.

It begins with a male-dressed Sandi Toksvig, enough recovered from the flu that postponed the piece’s official opening to hover in an armchair over the stage. She’s the narrator and jovially introduces us to Pantoland, a place which, as the first chorus shows, contains Dick Whittington, Red Riding Hood and fairytale characters galore. Will Fry turn Cinderella into a capsule version of them all? Given the show’s inventive ebullience it sometimes feels that way. But, no, it’s the old story with accretions, such as a Chippendale-style undressing scene for the male leads, a Gilbertian song in which Joseph Millson’s Prince parades his hatred of parties, and an abundance of jokes.

Overabundance, actually. I would have liked some of Fry’s more knowing and/or smutty jokes to have made way for more sightings of Ugly Sisters who, as played by Mark Lockyer and Hal Fowler, are splendidly grotesque. What is Toksvig doing, telling us that in a BBC Midsummer Night’s Dream she “gave my Bottom to John Humphry’s Snout”? Well, maybe that’s the Old Vic version of the Jade Goody gibes you get in downmarket pantos and it doesn’t prevent Fry giving us several familiar turns, including a quick-fire cream-bun fight and an even more cursory cooking lesson.

Also, we have to shout “cake” when anyone mentions the word and sing along with “my bonny lies over the ocean” because a completely irrelevant cow is yearning for a mate called Bonny, lately moved to America. The reason for this quaint event can only be to cover for the last big scene-change. Though cow doesn’t marry cow, Worrall’s sweet if squeaky-voiced Cinders comes down a vast staircase with her Prince. Paul Keating’s affable Buttons has clearly had a civil partnership with Oliver Chopping’s sleek Dandini – and Collins’s Cockney godmother pops out of, yes, a big cake.

And so? If you’re amused by a song in which men in nightgowns caper round the otherwise underused Lockyer and Fowler, who boast of their “girly breasts full of girly milk” and somehow contrive to get in an abstruse reference to an American state they call “West Vagina”, this may be the show for you. If not, well, maybe not.

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The best jokes

— Buttons: “Is she ugly? Let’s just say that the local peeping tom came along and begged her to close her curtains.”

— Cinderella, after a dream in which she meets the Prince at dawn: “Oh, your royal highness, what an urgent, insistent cock.”

— Ugly stepsister, meeting his royal highness at the ball: “I am delighted to see your anus.”

— Prince to Dandini: “You do such good voluntary work, patrolling the royal heath at night.”

— Buttons: “Did you know a person is knocked down by a horse and carriage every ten minutes?” Cinders: “Isn’t he getting fed up?”

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