Cinderella (Old Vic)

To say that Stephen Fry’s new version of Cinderella at the Old Vic is openly gay is to understate the case. It’s screamingly pink, relentlessly smutty, camp as Christmas and funny as flip flops. You can’t say “buttercup” without meaning “buttock up.” Prince Charming takes a shower with Dandini. And Cinders, writhing in dreams about her Prince, wakes to the dawn call of an urgent, insistent cock.

I’m not at all sure how this will go down with nice family parties from Islington or the local council estates. On the other hand, Fiona Laird’s production is beautifully designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis – King Neville XVII’s palace in Pantonia, where the Prince’s beloved is chosen by a phone-in vote, is a crystalline cave – and it is undeniably chuckle-worthy for those of a warped and sophisticated frame of mind.

The dreamboat of Buttons’ (Paul Keating) fantasy is the same as Cinderella’s: tall and dark, with strong thighs. And Prince Charming’s valet, Dandini (the appropriately named Oliver Chopping, for heaven’s sake), renowned for his charitable work on heath patrol after dark and his attention to drilling the cadets, fits the slot perfectly.

Cinders herself (appealing, croaky-voiced Madeleine Worrall) is the first in history to be accused by her own Fairy Godmother (a delightfully downmarket Pauline Collins) of suffering from pathological inanition. “Am I colourless and insipid, boys and girls?” she cries, bravely anticipating the positive response. As Buttons has already quoted Plato – “Happiness is contingent upon virtue” – we are prepared for long words and this slightly brain-boxy deconstruction of the genre.

The proceedings are supervised by Sandi Toksvig as a pipe-smoking narrator descending from the heavens in a leather armchair, imbued with the voice of Fry’s aromatic balsam and bristling with Radio Four-style asides (she boasts how, in a BBC Dream, she once gave her Bottom to John Humphrys’ Snout). Her function reveals the Fry approach to pantomime, which is one of dirty-minded metropolitan cynicism.

Buttons’ own special relationship with the audience is scuppered by Toksvig’s intervention. The two Ugly Sisters, Dolce and Gabbana (Mark Lockyer and Hal Fowler) are energetically amusing but lazily undifferentiated in character. The transformation scene is botched – the pumpkin just inflates to become a bigger pumpkin. And traditional elements such as the custard-pie slapstick and the song sheet with a big dewy-eyed heifer are bolted on, not “felt.”

Still, Anne Dudley’s songs, with Fry’s unfailingly literate lyrics, are pleasurably fresh and well despatched. Joseph Millson is a suitably erect Prince Charming and there is a lovely dipsomaniac cameo from Penny Layden as the Queen. It’s overall a better show than the Barbican’s pantomime, but offers much more to buffs and poufs than to Dads and kids.

– Michael Coveney