Christmas at the Theatre: It's Not All Pantomime

Although Christmas is a time for families, theatre can capitalise on the enforced jollity by offering a few hours escape from festive over-eating, repeats of seasonal TV favourites, the disappointment of receiving inappropriate gifts from elderly relatives and clichéd lists of Christstmas miseries. Most of the offerings are pantomime - or child-friendly, which is a shame given performance's recent enthusiasm for hard-hitting politics - but it is possible to find more esoteric pleasures.

As Mark Thomson of the Lyceum points out, however, pantomime isn't necessarily all evil. "They are actually one of the most theatrical forms: there is an absolute acknowledgment that there's an audience out there and we are talking to you and you will be able to talk to us too!  Try doing that on TV!" he says. "It's a kind of TGIF - let your hair down, take the piss out of politics, what's on the news, in the charts so the communing feels irreverent and subversive and spontaneous."

Since some of its traits emerge from vaudeville and cabaret, pantomime does fit with some of the more exciting experiments in contemporary theatre, and the increase in audiences for theatre helps the industry. In Edinburgh, the other most popular form of theatre, the musical, is reminding audiences why film has given the song and dance routines a new leash of life.

60s nostalgia takes to the stage with the first national tour of Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage. Having broken records in Germany and the UK for the highest advance ticket sales in history, the production is coming up to the Edinburgh Playhouse this month. 

Dirty Dancing is a holiday musical, in that it narrates the holiday romance between Frances 'Baby' Houseman and Johnny Castle. She: a 17-year old daddy's girl. He's the resort dance instructor and comes from the other side of the tracks. Relief from the cold weather is to be found in the sensual dance routines between the two main characters, who, of course, fall in love when they are "not supposed to." 

With more stories being ripped off the screen and taking the stage (such as Harold and Maude, and the Casablanca Gin Joint Cut), it comes as no surprise that the live version of Dirty Dancing promises to be the time of your life, just like the hit single from the movie.

Over the past decade, musicals have increasingly relied upon existing successes, either compiling pop hits into a vague narrative (Mamma Mia) or remaking films. Dirty Dancing does, at least, have a strong musical component in the film and is now old enough to count as a guilty pleasure.

Meanwhile, the Russian State Circus is aiming to occupy both Glasgow and Edinburgh: Edinburgh gets the rather predictable title of The Christmas Gift while Glasgow wins the more intriguing show Babushkin's Sekret. 

Russia has been famous for both the skill of its circus performers and the intensity of their training since its days as the Evil Empire: when the Soviet bloc collapsed, European circus arts were energised by the arrival of performers trained in the USSR and revitalised the classic acrobatic acts. The parallel development of large scale street theatre has transformed circus from the rather sad, dwindling sideshow into a serious, popular spectacular.

Babuskin's Sekret  is based on a Soviet legend about lost aristocratic jewels hidden in one of twelve chairs. A desk clerk races to find the richs, pursued by Bolsheviks. Perhaps familiar from a similar plot in George Formby vehicle Keep Your Seats, Please or even less likely Jack Benny's It's in the Bag, The Twelve Chairs has inspired over twenty adaptations. However, this is the first one that will be performed in a specially heated tent.

However, it isn't the plot that draws a circus audience: it's the action. Apart from the interludes of Russian clowns - which can be far more sinister than even the British versions - Moscow State Circus promises a calvacade of talent. The Stalkions do back-flips on pyramids that happen to be suspended 30 feet in the air: The Doktrov fly through the air, the Sherbakovs juggle while The Alikanov balance on the vertical pole. 

Aerial choreography is increasingly fashionable and each of these teams - apart from sounding like alien races out of Star Trek - offer the opportunity to see an international company at the top of their game. Rougher than Cirque de Soleil, and retaining that surreal edge that turns even mainstream Eastern European theatre into something unfamiliar, The Moscow State Circus are one of the few interesting legacies of the Cold War. Glasgow does seem to have the better show though: a George Formby-influenced action story with devious communists over the generic Christmas compilation. 

Both Dundee Rep and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow have a tradition of finding alternatives to pantomime: both offer a child-friendly play that draws on fairy tales yet has a stronger connection to the work presented by the venues during the rest of the year. The Rep's Snow Queen enlists Mike Kenny on script duties - best known for his version of The Railway Children - while the Citizens has put Dominic Hill, better known as the mastermind behind versions of Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter, on directing duties for Sleeping Beauty. Although Hill hasn't promised any existential terror or meditations on the nature of despotism, it is a mark of how seriously the Citizens takes its Christmas show. 

Of course, if these are a little too much, there is always the ballet version of The Snowman, although diabetics are likely to end up in a coma if they stay past the first scene. For a Christmas ballet with a little more edge, the national company are restaging former artistic director Ashely Page's Nutcracker. 

Daniel Davidson is becoming an old hand in Scottish Ballet's Christmas show: This is his second Nutcracker and he is performing several parts scattered across Ashley Page's reinvention of the familiar choreography. "I am doing the waltz of the flowers, a guest at the party at the end and Fritz, the heroine's brother," he says. "He's a bit of a toerag!" Yet while Page uses the sumptuous score of Tchaikovsky, he was unafraid to lend the choreography a contemporary sensibilty. 

Davidson notes that "at the beginning, the children are very childlike: and then characters progress and grow up and appreciate each other." Touches like this add depth to what only needs to be a spectacle: Page's sensibility, mixing psychological realism into the glamour of the fairy-tale, mirrors his take on dance. "He takes ballet moves," says Davidson, "and gives them a twist."

As Davidson points out, a trip to the ballet is often a traditional part of Christmas: his enthusiasm for Scottish Ballet's contemporary choreography is here married with a respect for the popularity of this classic story. Page's Christmas shows might become his enduring legacy for the company: although he did introduce new works to their repertoire and had them working with rising names, Nutcracker is an example of how he could integrate the classical and the modern.

If pantomime is aimed at a family audience - the popularity of The Pavilion's Wizard of Never Woz with the armed forces notwithstanding, possibly thanks to the outfits of the chorus girls - there's plenty for adults around the festive period. Mark Thomson of The Lyceum, talking about his Christmas show Cinderella, is quick to insist on this. "Oh yes there is!  I think, at its best, a Lyceum Christmas show has an integrity of story and a real sense of peril and emotional stakes that perhaps a traditional panto plays fast and loose with. We try to take both children and adults on a big journey that has real stakes and consequences.  I don't mean to say its po faced: it is anything but. Cinderella has a hilarious Johnny McKnight script, Alan Penman's melodic and effervescent songs and for our two nasty sisters we have, in Nicola Roy and Jo Freer, two of the funniest women on the Scottish stage.  We try to keep the spirit of Grimm in amongst the laughter and deliver the fun of being scared of the dark!"