Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, Sadler's Wells - review

The first taste may be taken with the eyes but Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker recognises that for true gratification you have to go a lot further.

Most Nutcrackers locate their second acts in a magical kingdom of dancing sweets but Bourne's is the only one where the sweets go around sampling each other's flavour. There is an orgy of licking, dipping, smacking, auto-degustation, at one point some simulated fellatio and all in all more tongue than you would ever expect to see unless Kiss reunite to do an All Black haka. Parents needn't worry, because by some alchemy it comes across as good, clean fun ... Well, almost - in a phrase Salman Rushdie once coined to sell us cream cakes, it's naughty but nice.

Much credit must go to Anthony Ward's disingenuous designs. The giant wedding cake on which the sweets dangle lasciviously is a virginal-white show stopper. The it-girl marshmallows of the Chinese dance are primped like pink poodles, and the Arabian-dancing, drug-pushing, orphan-groping Knickerbocker Glory (Adam Maskell) gets away with it because he resembles Terry Thomas in a whipped-cream-sundae wig.

Bourne's character-sketches are as sharp as the costumes, especially in the grim, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest orphanage of the first act, which contrasts tartly with the opulence of Sweetieland. From Hannah Vassallo's lovesick, accident-prone Clara right down to the most incidental bedwetter, everybody in this Nutcracker is animated with the brisk invention of a master caricaturist.

Until January 22 (0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com)

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!