Mary Brennan - The Herald **** (Four stars)

Five minutes in, and there's no mistaking which part of the pantosphere we're in: Sally - who will become the Sleeping Beauty in this story - is singing the praises of Musselburgh. And, apart from a brief diversion to Loch Ness, Musselburgh and its environs is where the action is.

Time was that local colour - place names, council politics, big cheeses - was as much an essential part of Scottish panto traditions as the cross-dressing dame and the happy splatter of messy slapstick. Fewer venues seem to take that trouble nowadays, but writer/director Liam Rudden wisely reckons that there's a special, fond laughter to be found in making sly references with a recognisable connection to your audience. All-out, roof-raising responses prove that his efforts to keep familiar stamping grounds in the foreground is definitely appreciated. It helps, of course, that Rudden has a feel for the mechanics of panto. He can write nippy patter and introduce entertaining wheezes.

The game would be a bogey, however, without a cast that can run with the gags and swiftly note how the audience reacts. Arron Usher (Daft Jamie) excels at this, his up-beat, palsy-walsy playfulness underpinned by a quick-witted instinct for what's working, a flair shared by Graham Crammond, whose archly garrulous Dame knows how to measure out the sauce'n'salt along with the tot-pleasing grotesquerie. And if Lori Mclean scares the weans as a rampingly wicked witch, she gets her comeuppance in a daft, all-action version of the Twelve Days of Christmas.