Weans In The Wood, Tron, Glasgow <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

For Londoners, the RSC-bred Forbes Masson may be familiar spouting the rhyming couplets of Shakespeare, but for Glaswegians, it's the sharp rhymes of his annual Christmas show that stick in the mind.

This year we find ourselves back in Masson's Pantoland, the northerly region of the country of Tartania, where the "weans" of Pantoland Primary (wean is a Scots word for child) are drilled in the mores of panto.

A couple of tired-looking musicians in elf outfits strike up with some hammy sound effects front of stage. "Don't talk to the musicians" spits Una Milroy, the man-dressed-as-a-woman head of Pantoland Primary. "There's a reason why they're in a pit".

Before we get to the schoolroom, there's a hilariously OTT prologue in which we are introduced to the arch villain and confectionery king, Fulton Funnock ("no relation to Tunnocks in case they sue"), an excellently evil George Drennan. Got up in a particularly nasty ginger pageboy wig, sequinned suit and spats, he zaps the pirouetting, saccharine-sweet Panto Primary swot Nancy and turns her into a Fondant Fancy before our very eyes. And then he eats her. Indeed, Masson ups the ante with a brilliant Wonka-cum-Aardman Fondant Fancifier machine, into which you literally shove an unwilling child (from the audience, if possible) to produce a small cake on a conveyor belt.

But the main gist of Masson's semi-ironic Christmas oeuvre, now in its fourth popular year, is presented in Pantoland Primary, where the rudiments of Panto are dissected.

There are some fabulously surreal moments, like when Dorothy the Extra ("she's not allowed to talk") emits a show-stealing silent scream before being turned into a Fondant Fancy. .

It's in the detail that Masson's panto succeeds -the sharp writing, the faint Green element, the send-up of Scottish "institutions" like Tunnocks, panto itself and ginger hair, and the special effects. But Masson's piece does sometimes cross the fine line from the joys of a sharply scripted send-up to the lows of all-too-pantoesque squirm. But, in the end, it's probably all worth it to hear a power ballad sung by a giant Fondant Fancy as the curtain falls.