Cinders doesn't deserve the ball

This alternative Cinderella features a romantic hero with a fantasy about a multi-storey car-park, a hippy fortune-teller with a sherry habit, and a long-suffering heroine whose menial tasks include cleaning a helter-skelter with a toothbrush.

It's funky fairground setting is part of a brave attempt to rescue a fairy-tale for children pressured to be streetwise from the cradle - but it ends up less of an imaginative roller-coaster than a production with as many hits and misses as any coconut shy.

Take, for instance, the ugly sisters, who both look like Cleopatra on one of her more butch days, and do a line in puns that would make any prospective Antony die of boredom. The National Theatre of Brent's John Ramm and Antonio Gil Martinez wrestle courageously with increasingly ludicrous costumes, yet comedic episodes like the dance of the

Cactus Queens - where Cinderella is invited on as Sanderella - seem inane exercises that aptly prove to be a humourless desert.

There is also a problem with Cinderella herself - who comes across as far too lilylivered and unassertive for an audience weaned on feminism and girl-power. Shereen Patrice has the beauty and the charisma to make the children coo with excitement when she finally arrives at the ball, but the script allows her no more than an insipid charm that makes her a fatally unengaging heroine.

Director Dan Jemmett has a fine history in innovative theatre through his involvement with the company Primitive Science. However, this production tries to entertain both adults and children with a quirky humour that veers awkwardly between the pretentious and the patronising. Cinderella may end up going to to the ball. But with such a pumpkin for a script, its prospects disintegrate well before the clock strikes midnight.

Cinderella