There are four principal species of Christmas stage shows: traditional pantomimes, serious dramas with seasonal settings, comic pieces from other tales or original stories, and children’s/family shows which are usually adaptations from kids’ books and scheduled for daytime performances. Having no tiny colleagues to accompany me, I’ve neglected the final category and visited representatives of each of the other three.

The Old Fire Station in Oxford prides itself on offering “Christmas shows for grown-ups”; it’s also vaguely appropriate that a venue co-run with the homelessness charity Crisis presents a show about a nervous father preparing to meet up with the daughter who left home two years earlier. Playwright Mike Bartlett is accomplished at interrogating our liberal assumptions, and here creates a figure who is hyper-conscious of possible incorrectness in certain areas whilst blind to his alienating conduct where it counts. It’s an excellent performance by Elliot Levey, under Clare Lizzimore’s direction. Bartlett is also moving ever farther into his provocative territory; where several of his earlier plays merely identify the argument, Snowflake actually has it out... and, of course, finds a tentatively affirmative resolution. ’Tis the season, after all.

Surprisingly, sudden and uncomfortable self-realisation also plays a part in The Messiah. Surprisingly, because the show as a whole is in the major key of what is technically known as “doing it crappily”. Patrick Barlow, one of the pioneers of deliberate rubbishiness, has dusted off and polished u— well, dusted off his script for the 1983 National Theatre of Brent presentation. As ever, the whole thing is performed by two men, neither of them the brightest star in the firmament, plus a guest soprano. Barlow’s self-regarding Desmond Olivier Dingle, the maison d’être of the project as he puts it, is reborn as Maurice Rose, played by Hugh Dennis; his hapless sidekick, now named Ronald Bream, is John Marquez. Both are masters of comic timing who expertly mine an already fecund script for every moment of bathos they can extract. They are augmented by suburban diva Mrs Leonora Fflyte, alias Lesley Garrett, who delivers selections from Handel’s oratorio with astounding dignity and, on press night at least, did not corpse once. And there is a genuine heart beating beneath all the mickey-taking, such that Dennis’s real-life Anglican bishop father would probably approve.

Which leaves panto proper, and in London that increasingly means Hackney Empire’s rumbustious romp. Aladdin offers no celebrities, but a tried and trusted core crew: Kat B as the Genie of the Lamp, Tameka Empson as a ras-claat Empress, a recorded Sharon D Clarke as the voice of the earth-goddess (emerging from the mouth of a giant monkey), and of course Clive Rowe, now unchallenged as the finest panto dame south of the River Trent. After a fruitless, wildly underused stint in Wimbledon last year, Rowe is back on home turf as Widow Twankey, and he rollicks off all four walls, with a singing voice powerful enough to drown out the band. The band in Hammersmith, that is. Writers Susie McKenna and Steven Edis never quite know when to stop, far exceeding the “hour each way” golden panto mean, but their material is always entertaining. Here the traditional (including a “slosh” routine set in Twankey’s laundry which manages to succeed without being old-skool messy) and the topical (exotic Ha-ka-ney is facing an economic squeeze following its secession from the Eastern Union) barge up against each other like a pair of comedy wrestlers. All this and a chorus line of pandas.

Written for the Financial Times.