Cinderella is famously the pantomime that gives you double the fun, with a pair of dames in the Ugly Sisters.

In the Reading Hexagon’s top-quality production this year Paul Morse and Ian Ganderton do the honours as, respectively, Flatula and Verruca. A comic pairing of great success, with relishable bitchery directed at Anna Williams’s saintly Cinders and loads of truly outrageous costumes for which the head of wardrobe Dawn Outhwaite deserves heartiest congratulations. The duo’s unscripted pratfall during the (very messy) bathroom slop scene added hugely to the fun on opening night. They should keep it in.

Cinderella can also supply a bonus in the principal boy department when, as here, the creative team (headed by director Iain Lauchlan) goes down the traditional route of giving us girls in breeches. Thus we have a booted, thigh-slapping Prince Charming in Claire Trusson and more of the same from Jessie Lilley as his punctilious servant, Dandini.

For younger members of the audience, unused to this strange theatrical conceit, it helps that Jon Clegg’s Buttons is on hand with a number of wise-cracks concerning their lack of trousers.

Clegg will be recognised by many as a finalist in this spring’s Britain’s Got Talent. He is an impressionist, so through him we meet, besides the Hardups’ servant, a gallery of characters that include Ant and Dec, Alan Carr and some of the Simpsons.

The productions other famous faces are Liza Goddard as the Fairy Godmother and Dave Myers, one half of the telly cookery partnership, The Hairy Bikers, as the good-natured Baron Hardup. We don’t get to meet his nasty wife, incidentally, but hear plenty of her imperious commands shouted from above.

On the evidence supplied here Ms Goddard is not much of a singer and Mr Myers can’t really act. But, of course, this is panto-land where neither deficiency is really much of a handicap to a good night (or after-noon) out.

Cinderella 
The Hexagon, Reading
Until January 4
Box office: 0118 960 6060 or readingarts.com