Sleeping Beauty, Young Vic, London,<br></br>A Christmas Carol, Lyric, Hammersmith, London

Terrific tale of the unexpected

The Prince's kiss creates as many problems as it solves in this weird and wonderful Sleeping Beauty. Having played mischievous variations on the Perrault fairy tale in the first half, Rufus Norris's darkly and drolly imaginative version proceeds to provide a sequel to the story, courtesy of the hero's mother, who happens to be a closet ogre, with a slavering taste for human flesh. How Beauty's babies manage to survive Granny's gourmandising urges is the adventure that keeps you on the edge of your seat through some gloriously bad-taste sequences in Norris's own witty and sinister production.

The presiding spirit of the piece is Goody (the extraordinary Helena Lymbury), a seriously anxious fairy, with a woodland Puck-like provenance, a startling bog-brush coiffure and a charming tendency to fart whenever she performs magic. Spells spell smells, when she's around. It's characteristic of the show's refusal to make a neat division between good and evil that it bundles up the attributes of both traditionally contrasting fairies into this ambivalent, klutzily conflicted figure, who is left remorseful and with waning magic powers as a result of her curse.

Similarly, the "baddies" in the second half at least have the excuse that they are following their own natures. As the Prince's ogre-mother, Daniel Cerqueira is like a prodigious, literally man-eating pantomime dame, snuffling hungrily around her progeny. But, as she remarks in what sounds like a cheeky allusion to La Cage aux Folles, "Do you think I have any choice? I am what I am." In fact, without ever turning in the least bit preachy, Norris's story eventually demonstrates that all species – fairies, ogres, and humans – have the capacity to rise above their instincts.

The show is splendidly cast, with James Loye a particular delight as a rosy-cheeked hearty chump of Prince who goes in for preposterous displays of pint-sized derring-do and has to be shown which bit of Beauty to kiss. Katrina Lindsay's terrific set places most of the action on a high central drum with trapdoors through which nightmare briars can sprout or corpses be dumped. Both direct and sophisticated, primal and glintingly allusive, this Sleeping Beauty continues the Young Vic's proud tradition of mounting the best Yuletide show in London.

Over at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Neil Bartlett and team are taking a more minimalist approach to a version of A Christmas Carol that seems at times to have been produced on a budget of which the unreformed Scrooge would have approved. Performed on Robin Whitmore's black-and-white toy-theatre sets, the show lays heavy stress on the onomatopoeic qualities of Dickens's language – turning his words into sound effects for scratching quills, ticking clocks and howling winds. Though there are moments of magic, the chill of this version never convincingly converts into cheer. Similarly, while Tim Piggott-Smith makes a strikingly sour-faced curmudgeon, he fails to touch your heart at the end when Scrooge recognises what his life has forfeited

The ghosts and spirits are amusingly done (Marley's face bulges from a doorknob; a disembodied dressing gown waves a hand at its owner). But where is the terror in the piece? An adaptation of this classic that causes not a frisson of fear is A Christmas Carol sung out of tune.

'Sleeping Beauty' to 25 Jan (020-7928 6363); 'A Christmas Carol' to 4 Jan (020-8741 2311)