Mother of all drag queens

Sir Ian McKellen triumphantly slipped into several hideous dresses and wild wigs, assorted high-heels and low jokes yesterday. He looked like bad taste rampant.

A generous slap of eye-shadow and a touch of lady-like primping and preening followed on. Sir Ian had returned to his dyed roots - and his Lancashire accent - emerging as a dragartist sublime in Bille Brown's new pantomime script.

Director Sean Mathias has deftly created a production with the aid of John Napier's enchanting sets, poorish songs and redundant dances, in just four weeks' rehearsals.

McKellen remains the show's big, main attraction. Just to see him as several awful varieties of mutton dressed up as lamb, from plumpish, frumpish Lancastrian housewife with a complexion of leather and rouge, to chic slimmeddown chanteuse, proves a wicked, comic pleasure.

Let Lily Savage look to her knickers, and the shades of Marlene Dietrich and Thora Hird, not to mention female impersonators in gay clubs all over England to their reputations.

For Sir Ian's Dame Twankey, a randy, showbusiness-mad widow in the Wigan end of Old Peking - whose teenage son Aladdin comes up against Roger Allam's depraved, hyper-theatrical Abbanazar in a battle for that lamp - reveals himself as the mother of all drag queens.

Only an actor to his fingertips and probably painted toenails could manage the leap from male to female with such gorgeous nonchalant finesse. The joke and disguises work so well because Sir Ian stations Twankey in no man's land between the genders.

His part may seem at first ungenerously small - but how he makes its presence felt. He keeps his male voice to sing not badly and cavort as if he imagined himself sylph-like, while accentuating roguish, mildly camp manners familiar from his conventional performances: that tongue playing around the cheeks and pursed lips, clasped hands, hooded eyes narrowing, that grand, swaggering hauteur as Twankey takes to theatricals like a cat to a canary.

Initially Brown's script revels in clever, smutty badinage, or cocks witty political snooks at Blair and Blunkett, while Twankey watches over the washing of dirty linen in her laundry's semi-public view. Sadly for adults, the wittiness soon fades out.

A charming, elegant match for Sir Ian's gender-realignment, Maureen Lipman dons a moustache and lowers her voice to become the nicely bemused Dim Sum.