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Unusually, the Prince, usually a cipher in works like this has a personality. He even gets a name - Ramiro and a best friend, Dandini. Specifically he’s fed up - and swapping costumes for a masquerade with Dandini should guarantee that Cinderella doesn’t fall for him just because of who he is. Unless she reads Hello of course. It’s funny how as soon as he unmasks everyone recognises him, except Cinderella.

There’s no fairy godmother, instead a washed out Statue Fairy works the magic, while looking as if she has been quietly gathering leaf mould on a pedestal for years. In the absence of particularly strong leads (and far too many of Scottish Ballet’s principals and guest principals are off injured), the honours go to the character roles. Cinderella’s family is a heaving mass of vulgarity - Elspeth Shaw and Preston Clare ham it up as stepmother and father respectively, while Anne Christie and Lorna Scott are a contrasting pair of stepsisters. Christie is at her strongest when she portrays Tisbe as an airhead, while Scott’s Clorinda always chases the main chance and always misses it. In themselves they’re not particularly nasty - there is none of the active malevolence other Cinderellas suffer. This is far too amiable a work for that, and if in consequence, it loses some of the magic, it also gains. At the ball, a brooding Ramiro encounters Cinderella who has left the main body, and as they unmask during a pas de deux, they reveal more to each other than just their faces.

Dawn Sutton was an unsatisfactory Statue Fairy, lacking both ethereality and presence. She danced most of her solos as though she were marking the role and never quite had a sense of occasion. Vadim Bondar looked good as the Prince, but both Campbell McKenzie and Yi-Lei Cai, as Dandini on separate nights, looked better. An exotic birds pas de six was so badly muffed in places, it made me wish I had a shotgun. The two scene stealers, though, were Peter Holder, as the delightfully titled "Persistent Little Man" and Gavin Fitzgerald as a majordomo straight out of Blackadder.

The difference in performances on two consecutive nights led me to believe that Theis and Bondar will rapidly settle in to these roles. In the grand pas de deux that closes the ballet, Theis looked deeply uncomfortable on the first night, failing to stay on the music in her own solo. On the second night, she seemed far stronger, and had leisure to think in the present rather than the future.

The corps were at times chaotic, but that seemed mostly due to over-fast music and some fiendish ensemble work, as well as space limitations. The low point was a poorly performed pas de six for Exotic Birds that had me longing for a shotgun, although on the second night, Ari Takahashi sparkled as one of them. The high point was some of the corps work - the first scene included some superb servants and comic cooks, interspersed with solos from the two male leads, while the guests at the ball wore dark green and masks in a forest setting that owed far more to The Dream than to any polite court. Add in music that had the audience humming as they left the theatre, and Scottish audiences have a Christmas treat well worth catching.