Frock's hit and myth

How refreshing it is to come across a fairy-tale-based show outside the traditional family theatre-going month of December.

If anyone knows better than to get stuck in the Christmas ghetto, it is that endlessly inventive team from Cornwall, Kneehigh Theatre, creators of the award-winning Red Shoes. Here, they welcome in the spring with a story of love blossoming unexpectedly in previously sealed-off hearts.

Straight away, we find ourselves in the realm of happy-ever-after. A blissfully happy king and queen dote on each other and their daughter Mary. "I can't give you anything but love," croon the parents of one's dreams. Fearfully, we realise that things can only get worse.

Which they swiftly do in Tom Morris and Emma Rice's adaptation of Cinderella myths from around the world, as Mary's mother dies and her father vows to take as his new bride the woman whose finger his dead wife's ring fits.

Mary, regrettably in this instance, is a curious child and thus the ghoulish events unfold. Kneehigh commendably do not shy from the sheer unpleasantness inherent in fairy tales and thus Amanda Lawrence's excellent Mary turns from a carefree girl to a hunted, homeless young woman.

Yet while they can do dark well, Kneehigh positively revel in the joyous. There is onstage music from a range of instruments and the sheer beauty produced by a handful of props simply deployed is a thing of wonder.

The cast of five, doubling up roles, are uniformly tremendous, with special mention going to Alex Murdoch's lovable palace handyman Ronald. If there's a criticism to be made here, it is that events play themselves out by the interval and we return to what is, in effect, a completely new and less engaging piece.

There's another fairy tale turned sour on offer from the BAC's near neighbour, the Latchmere, albeit one that is not for children and is not a patch on The Wooden Frock.

Wonderland, a sanitised and distinctly Disney-esque theme park, faces internal insurrection from two employees, who are tired of the bland sentiments it peddles and, more frighteningly, the colour-coded balloons it gives junior visitors to signify the level of their families' compliance with the political regime.

The metaphor of theme park as fascist state is not one new to theatre and although writer/director Liz Tomlin has a few fresh points to make, she spoils her work by making it increasingly and unnecessarily convoluted.