Theatre

From the dressing-up box, actors clamber into a toy theatre, a satisfying Pollocks proscenium. "This is a story about a shoe," announces one. Others maintain it is a story about love, or mothers, or mice, but Cinderella says firmly, "This is a story about me." The Lyric Hammersmith's Cinderella, loosely inspired by the stories of Angela Carter, reminds us that fairy tales only incidentally celebrate sugar and spice. Thrillingly, they also allow the down- trodden ego to flourish, so that we shudder with pleasure, recognition and vengeance as the neglected skivvy rises from the ashes, shakes off the slut-dust and shines, to the mortification of her abusers. Kiss my ash, scumbags!

Cinderella was devised by Improbable Theatre and Neil Bartlett, and it romps with archetypes and artifice. For all its improvisatory texture, the principals of pantomime remain. Cinderella's stepsisters look like fearsomely ruched prop forwards, spiteful bullfrogs with false breasts. Buttons (Martin Freeman), buoyant but unrequited, reminds us that even a nifty pillbox hat may not summon romance. Angela Clerkin's refreshingly stroppy heroine rises above her familiar, miserable besom, the unrelenting broom of twigs. Best of all is a daffy mouse chorus, serenading us with the delirious "Cheese in Moonlight" ("It's a very specific phenomenon").

Cinderella's dead, vigilant mother also stalks the production, shrouded and chill as moonlight. Fairy tales tendril through fragile mortality, while children's shows increasingly look to the dark side of the moon. The macabre Shockheaded Peter, also produced by the Improbables, tours next year. At the Young Vic, Arabian Nights unfolds in the shadow of death, Scheherazade's 1,001 tales are stratagems to stave off the sword that is whetted between scenes. A contemporary classic, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (National Theatre, Cottesloe), was written at the least hopeful point of the author's fortunes, story-telling a desperate recuperation of security. Even smart-arse Stephen Sondheim explores spooky stories in Into the Woods (Donmar Warehouse), their glinting hazards captured in the adamantine brilliance of his snapdragon rhymes.

Fairy-tale treatments in our late century increasingly stray from enlightened enchantment into the dark and tulgey woods inhabited by the gnarled originals of our scrubbed up stories. In these ancient fables, families are baffling nests of cruelty, and endings are abrupt as amputations. The earliest printed Red Riding Hood, by the Versailles courtier Charles Perrault, gets no further than "All the better to eat you with", at which the wolf swiftly gobbles our incautious heroine and the story's done. As Marina Warner notes in her teeming new study, No Go the Bogeyman, Perrault wrote when the wolf, formerly the baying peril of famine-struck rurality, came to stand for other, human rapacities, as "a metaphorical consumer of virgin flesh".

If myths of childhood as a bubble of numinous innocence ever truly worked, they are currently in abeyance. Now, children are required to grow up fast, to recognise the wolfy sexual predator, learn the three Rs and the rules of citizenship, understand safe sex. The very air is polluted, perilous; they must protect themselves, grow a premature carapace. Having initially embraced the deadpan cruelties of fairy tale in Into the Woods, Sondheim later squishes the most vivid characters while the spell-shocked survivors sit around holding seminars in good parenting. The urge to force stories into the pulpit, to blur their hard edges with instruction, is tempting. But education inevitably encroaches on innocence; as with ignorance (which, as Lady Bracknell remarks, "is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone"), it tarnishes with teaching. Learn a good lesson and forget your innocence.

There's a paradox here. As kids' culture wises up, adult entertainment shelters in extended adolescence, driven by thirtysomethings who suspect they last had a sense of humour in the seventies. Where the two cultures coalesce is in wonder-tales, fuelled by adrenaline imagination and dappled with gore. Cinderella preserves the Grimms' gruesome twist in which the stepmother slices off her daughters' heels and toes to cram them into the slipper, although this production balks at Carter's vision of the heroine essaying a slipper still slick and warm with their blood.

As much as by Carter's fairy tales, the production is inspired by her essay "In Pantoland", an imaginative deconstruction of pantomime, that raddled remnant of ancient fertility rites. Pantoland, says Carter, is "the carnival of the unacknowledged and the fiesta of the repressed", where everyone talks in double entendre, a language whose accents are eyebrows "dipped in the infinite riches of a dirty mind".

Bartlett says Cinderella tries to imagine a theatre Carter might enjoy. Although the show misses her voluptuous, crackling language, she would no doubt have relished the self-referential theatricality, the sombre pools of myth and, one hopes, the mice. All without coercive audience participation, which is wonderful. The return of the repressed is all very well, but not when it's holding a song-sheet.

"Cinderella" runs at the Lyric Hammersmith, King St, London W6 (0181-741 2311) until 9 January 1999

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