There's always a suspicion when you're watching one of Forbes Masson's highly enjoyable pantos that the adults in the audience are having a better time than the kids. Masson delights in subverting the panto form and is as likely to deliver a gag about a gag as the gag itself.
A panto in quotation marks - a kind of meta-panto - is an adult pleasure, but the party of 12-year-olds in my 10am performance lapped it up equally. "It's not odd," said one girl to her friend in the interval. "It's brilliant."
Actually, it's both. Where most pantos dust down an old story and add a few topical references, Masson reinvents the thing from the inside. While he's doing so, he points out the shortcuts being taken elsewhere.
Thus we find ourselves in Pantoland Primary, where the delightful Baxter Beattie and Logan MacLean - their names an amalgam of Scottish variety greats - are learning the basics of the pantomime craft.
Soon the youngsters - played by Kevin Lennon and Sally Reid - are drawn into the forest to come face to face with a force of evil: George Drennan's "f"-fixated Fulton Funnock.
It means the classic narrative is strong enough to let Masson get away with a love song about children wriggling in their seats during love songs and a custard pie routine about how to do a custard pie routine. His songs are as witty as his script, Helen MacAlpine is infectious as a hyperactive squirrel and the whole thing, it would seem, really is fun for all the family.
· Until January 7. Box office: 0141-552 4267.
