Not so much a pantomime but a children's play, which I suspect adults will enjoy just as much – more, possibly – than the younger audience.

Writer Andrew Pollard and director Adam Sunderland follow The Nutcracker Prince by taking the Cinderella story and give it a Scarborough twist.

The prince is no royal but Sevril Pence, the surfing heir to a slot machine kingdom, while Cinders (Martina Horrigan) suffers at the hands of her widowed father’s money-grabbing new wife, May Force, and her awful daughter. And yes, she is called Gail Force.

So just the one “ugly sister”, but following pantomime tradition she’s played by a man (a wonderfully petulant Howard Gossington).

The script introduces elements that you won’t find in the usual glittery seasonal show.

There are comments about Cinderella, or Ella Drift as she is here, being mixed race, there’s brief discussion of Sevril's sexuality as his father wonders why he doesn’t have a girlfriend and the Fairy Crabmother gets eaten for dinner.

Ella goes to the beach ball on a giant surfboard garlanded with recycled plastic bottles collected by youngsters from the audience. But she’s warned to leave before the sand in the timer – streaming down from above throughout the interval – runs out.

There’s some Tom And Jerry violence in which May Force’s limbs are broken, strained and stretched, leaving her resembling a human bandage by the final curtain.

And in a neat, if ghoulish, twist Gail tries to make her big feet smaller and the right size to fit in Ella’s mislaid shoe by having a fishy pedicure, only for her mother to introduce piranha into the water.

The in-the-round staging is economic but inventive and attractive in Jan Bee Brown’s designs. The few brief songs and dancing, by two teams of local performers, are fine.

So too are the performances. Becky Hindley is a riot as the loud, vulgar and, not to beat about the lush, utterly vile May Force. She’s certainly a force to be reckoned with, reducing Ella to a skivvy and courting any man with a bulging wallet.

As surfing Sevril, Iddon Jones shows himself well able to ad lib in the face of comments from the audience, and Paul Ryan doubles up as Ella’s dad and an over-the-top entertainer.

Until December 15. Box office 01723 370541 and online sjt.uk.com