No fairy godmother, no pumpkin, no midnight curfew, no glass slippers - and two stepsisters who wear their ugliness on the inside only. What have the director, Melly Still, and her coadapter, Ben Power, done to our Cinders?

Well, they’ve gone back to the source - or, at least, to another source.

Modern versions of this ancient tale tend to follow the prettifications added by Charles Perrault. This is the gnarlier version from the Brothers Grimm, conveyed in a playful but unparodic folk-theatre style that adds narration, music and mime to its scenes.

It’s not quite fully realised. Still, who co-directed the 2006 seasonal smash Coram Boy, and Power, who coadapted this year’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, can overegg their Christmas pudding.

Their opening lays on too many subplots and flashbacks - some borrowed from other Grimm tales - before the main narrative has found its feet. But once they stop underscoring the story’s ideas about persistence and longing and get on with telling it, this show seduces and surprises.

Elizabeth Chan’s Cinderella is a smiling innocent, no match for her new stepsisters Dorothy and Candide. Played as cheery boarding-school types by Katherine Manners and Kelly Williams, they have the true bully’s talent for making their victims doubt themselves. “Only kidding,” they insist after some spiteful dig, and their disingenuity sends a wave of impotent rage through the audience.

You wouldn’t insult this show by calling it realistic, but it can mix modern-day mores with the mythical without getting all Shrek on us. The playboy Prince, played with can’t-believe-my-luck suavity by Daniel Weyman, falls for the mystery stranger at his ball. “You only want her,” tuts Gráinne Byrne as his mother, “because she keeps running off.” And as the six actors animate the bird puppets that help Cinders, or as Terge Isungset wanders around playing his rave harmonica - well, that’s what it sounds like - the show harnesses our imagination. And when Still plunges us into the fray by staging the last of the Prince’s three balls in the bar in the interval, her show’s occasional stiltedness is gone. Sophia Clist pitches the stage design between showbiz and Scandinavia, with a silver-birch-tree forest offsetting a high platform with Isungset’s instruments on.

Sometimes earthy, sometimes wry, at its best the show is both. And if it falls just short of the gothic abandon that Kneehigh Theatre have previously brought to this address, it’s still an inventive, involving telling of this endlessly rich story.

Bring the kids, of course. Just warn them there’ll be no Buttons, no songs, and no eyeballs left in some characters’ faces by the end.

Box office: 0871 221 1729, to Jan 3

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010