Cinderella, Lyric Hammersmith, London

"Do I wake or sleep?" I wondered at the interval of Cinderella, when I seemed to have occupied my seat longer than for the whole of Mourning Becomes Electra. Was I in a theatre - a professional theatre - in London? And should I take a colleague's bet that no one would return for the second half?

Perplexity, alas, is the only emotion roused by Dan Jemmett's Cinderella, a show that is so much worse than dreadful that it smothered any incipient stirrings of rage and indignation. The director is the only person at whom a finger of blame can be pointed, for, in a fit of postmodernism or economy, he has dispensed with an author in favour of a show "devised" by the company. The cast includes actors (John Ramm, Bob Goody) with plenty of devising- and even writing-experience under their belts, but the non-auteur theory implemented by Jemmett, of the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, is a non-starter. Add to the clumsy jokes and diffuse, rambling story the gloomy set of Anthony MacIlwaine and the decrepit-house-of-horror sound of the music played on an organ, and you have a show that wouldn't even be welcome at Hallowe'en.

Jemmett does have a concept, but it's a shaky one. His production is set in Prince's, a broken-down fairground that young Prince wants to level for a car park - until he meets Cinderella and thinks instead about restoring the place to its former glory. But, while the faded and shabby amusement park may work as a metaphor for our national institutions, it's a Barmecide feast for the eyes. The horses on the tacky little carousel remain shrouded most of the time and, when uncovered, are nothing special; a transformation is announced but turns out to be merely the switching-on of several strings of colourless light bulbs, many of them burnt out. This cheery vista is complemented by the hilarious comedy of an old man trying, and failing, to do a handstand and a knock-knock joke about tuberculosis.

I may be oversensitive to the stepsisters' ordering Cinderella to clean up a huge mess with a toothbrush (the public humiliation imposed on Jews by the Nazis), but I think others would also cringe at the way they push around Shereen Patrice, a pretty, slight and frightened-looking black girl, and flail at her with a whip. Equally discordant, in a different way, to the traditional mood of light-hearted fantasy was the clowning of Geoffrey Carey, madly camp but not at all funny as a mechanical fortune-teller who gets fed up with sitting in a box and leaves it to take deep breaths and flap his wrists about.

The patchwork of musical styles ("Beautiful Dreamer", "My Ideal", "Blue Christmas", "Your Feet's Too Big") also fails to create a mood, and there is no ball; just a few people in hideous costumes, shuffling about the grubby structures of the fair. Saddest of all is the spectacle of the actors struggling like fish out of water in their attempts to put across a non-joke. Only once did a line hit the mark: reading a proclamation in broken English, an actor stopped and asked: "Who writes this stuff?"

To 10 January (0870 050 0511)