Forgive the oxymoron, but for many years London Bubble has produced London's most intelligent pantomime. Now the company has changed direction with a "fairly scary fairytale" based on an Italian story, The Crystal Casket. Audiences will recognise the archetypal elements - a jealous stepmother, a poisoned apple, a fatal dress, a cottage where the heroine takes up darning big-time for the male inhabitants, and a dopey prince. It takes a while to get going (the early scenes come across as a busy and pale Kneehigh lookalike) but it gradually weaves a real spell, and in the second half achieves the right mix of magic and humour, with Simon Startin's delicious Queen ruling over her son and a police-state kingdom while ordering her son's comatose fiancée to be given a good vacuuming.
Like many tales from an oral tradition, this is a story about the importance of storytelling itself, as Esmerillina's widower father loses the gift for telling tales in grief and remarries too quickly. His new wife is the village teacher, a woman who does not believe stories are useful, and whose rage and jealousy of her stepdaughter manifests itself in Li-Leng Au's wonderful witch woman. Left without a mother, Esmerillina goes in search of her own story with the witch in hot pursuit, before finally regaining those three fairytale essentials - happiness, home and a husband (royal, of course).
This little show has a simple sweetness, some fine integration of video and, although the in-the-round sometimes makes the staging appear clumsy, the benefit is a real immediacy. Two hours that both nourish and entertain.
· Until January 13. Box office: 020-8692 4446.
