Showing @ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 3 Dec

Driving a stake through the heart of twee-ness, Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker is a tongue in cheek, frothy, beautifully choreographed, occasionally smutty, candy coloured, camp delight from beginning to end and features more transformative power than a car park full of autobots.

Bourne’s take on Tchaikovsky’s perennial favourite begins not in the warmth and comfort of a well lit family home but in the bleak stony-grey world of Dr Dross’ Home for Waifs and Strays. The dancers get the unquenchable spirit of childhood spot on and the contrast between the grim institutional world and the fantasies to come make them all the brighter and more astonishing on the eye.

As Clara, Hanna Vassallo is everything you could want with a mix of girlishness and burgeoning desire – never better displayed than on the frozen lake where her glee and longing are played out in movements that might make the more prudish parents cover their little ones’ eyes. There’s a fair bit of sauciness in this show – as you might expect from Bourne, and it gets even wilder and more brazen as the action enters Sweetieland, a retina scarring blaze of colour and light from designer Anthony Ward. It provides the perfect backdrop to the powder puff pink Marshmallow Girls, bovver booted Gobstoppers and flamenco dancing Liquorice Allsorts who fill the stage; the highlight of the action being the Russian Dance performed by the company in front of an enormous wedding cake which offers a camp crescendo to proceedings.

There’s a blissful throwing away of the rulebook here wiping from your memory all the over iced saccharine productions of the past, replacing them with something altogether more life affirming and fun. And for a production first staged in 1992 this still feels like a newly unwrapped present with its exhilarating embrace of silliness which carries the audience along in its wake. In these straightened times it’s tricky to decide where to spend your Christmas money. You could take a trip to pantoland and watch a superannuated comic deal in double entendres whilst belting out the songs of JLS or – and it’s just a suggestion – you could chose to lose yourself in this multicoloured wonderland for two hours of balletic bliss.