Pantomimes at this venue are never conventional, and this year’s offering, written by Trish Cooke and Robert Hyman and directed by Kerry Michael, is no exception. Cinders is a feisty young heroine better known as Ella. Her widowed dad is an impoverished artist whose paintings resemble knock-off Picassos and whose colourfully tiled but dilapidated mansion looks, in Jenny Tiramani’s designs, like a Gaudi. Prince Leo – or Prince Pretty Boy, as he prefers to be called – is a blinged-up hip-hop poser whose sidekick, Don Dini, is an Ali G lookalike in gold lamé. This is 21st-century panto, and on the whole it’s great fun.

Darren Hart as an irresistible Buttons wins over kids and adults alike from the off with his energy and natural warmth; his banter with Debbie Korley’s plucky, determined Ella is hugely enjoyable. Also winning is Debbralee Wells, a glamorous fairy godmother who is in fact Ella’s dead mum, now working as a celestial weather controller. She makes her entrance in a rainbow-coloured dress and wings, riding a glittery cloud; and for her daughter’s preball transformation, she sings amid thunder and lightning of “cooking up a storm”, Caribbean-style. The result is the appearance, beneath swaying palm trees, of a lovely pumpkin coach with two mouse footmen and pulled by a pair of enormous enchanted fleas made from delicate translucent gauze. A few disappointments interrupt the show’s sunshine, however. Michael Bertenshaw’s wicked stepmother has a pleasingly angular Cruella De Vil quality, but he needs to be far more camply outrageous, as do Sharona Sassoon and Catherine Millsom as the Ugly Sisters Sugary and Spicy. Omar F. Okai’s choreography is uninspired, while Hyman’s songs are mostly dull, and too often unforgivably badly sung.

And Cooke’s book suffers from some tonal unevenness. When the new Baroness destroys a portrait of Ella’s mother, it’s moving; but forcing Spicy, in the slipper-fitting sequence, to eat the toes that Sugary has just lopped off her own foot with a meat cleaver is a queasily incongruous step too far.

Otherwise, though, this is a cheery, jolly show that gives the last word to the fairy godmother: “Enjoy your life, people!” Sound advice at any time of year.

Box office: 020-8534 0310

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