Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent a happy childhood making Christmas gifts in their factory at the North Pole.

The action begins when Buddy decides to track down his real father in New York, but when he arrives he finds a community sunk in greed and cynicism. He’s horrified to learn that everyone exploits Christmas for financial gain. His dad, Walter Hobbs, turns out to be a bullied publishing executive who has no time to spend with his wife and his lonely younger son. Buddy’s mission is to restore love to this broken family and to repair the fractured society of New York. Along the way, he starts a corny romance with a sexy blonde elf, Jovie, who works in Santa’s grotto at a department store.

The power of the story lies in its goofy simplicity and in the ingenious brilliance of analysing capitalism through the eyes of a trusting and incorruptible innocent who believes in the original message of Christmas.

The challenges faced by Buddy seem insurmountable. Can he heal the suffering Hobbs family? Will he save Walter from his nasty, rapacious bosses? Is it possible for him to find love with a part-time elf? Well, it’s Christmas, so everything is possible.

Simon Lipkin dazzles as Buddy, and he easily matches the loose-limbed charm of Will Ferrell in the 2003 movie. Tom Chambers shines as the pinched and angry Walter who chooses love over greed and rebels against his heartless bosses. Dermot Canavan is a little powerhouse of comic invention as the Manager who believes that Buddy is an undercover agent sent by his superiors to spy on Santa’s grotto.

In the closing scenes, all is resolved. Buddy purges the city of evil and finds happiness with Jovie. The final moments are as moving as anything in Dickens. This is an unexpected heartbreaker. Just wonderful.

Baghdaddy by Jasmine Naziha Jones has a similar opening to Elf. An innocent teenager, named Dad, arrives in Britain from Iraq in 1980. But unlike Buddy, Dad has no mission to fulfil and no powers to wield. He’s idle and purposeless and he mopes around the place complaining about things. The food is too bland, his bedroom is too cramped, his Cockney landlady is a screeching moron who claims to be bilingual because she knows the origins of the term ‘cul-de-sac’. Racist youths call him a ‘camel jockey’, and one of them tries to murder him. The Iran-Iraq war begins but Dad is too scared to go home so he continues his pointless life in Britain. What’s he doing? We aren’t told. So we don’t care.

Scroll forward ten years and Dad has married a local girl (but she’s omitted from the story, presumably because she’s British and therefore not oppressed). Dad has turned into a violent loser who bullies his daughter, Darlee, by twisting her ear and yanking her around the house. She sprawls on her mattress wailing: ‘I hate you!’ In his better moods Dad takes her to McDonald’s and bores her with reminiscences of Baghdad which mean nothing to her because she hasn’t bothered to learn Arabic.

The meandering scenes of gormless bickering between father and daughter are supplemented with impenetrable dream sequences peopled by unnamed sprites dressed as children’s entertainers. These shimmering goblins scream humiliating insults at Darlee or they argue among themselves. Their tone of hectoring superiority rises by a few decibels when the Iraq invasion begins in 2003. The goblins, along with Darlee, denounce every party involved. They berate the UN for imposing sanctions, they lambast Tony Blair for warmongering, they denounce Saddam for despoiling his own people. All we learn here is that political comment delivered by ghosts in silly costumes lacks impact.

However the press-night performance was distinguished by wild and constant applause. The stalls were dotted with little fan clubs of the cast, none of whom will have paid for a ticket, and there were regular eruptions of laughter from each group as they cheered a piece of business performed by their favourite. It was like a Nativity play. If you knew the actors, you were charmed. If you didn’t, you were bored.

In the script’s closing moments, the writer attacks the Arts Council for funding her petulant rant. ‘Gatekeepers hold the door for me. Yeah. Aren’t I lucky? I’m the Jerry Maguire of trauma. Show me the money.’ It’s curious that Naziha Jones feels angry and frustrated that her teenage jottings are being produced on the London stage. There must be some inner torment eating away at her. Perhaps she knows deep down that without the subsidised sector her voice would be ignored because there’s no demand in the commercial theatre for these pipsqueak diatribes.

The Arts Council claims to promote merit when it merely identifies talentlessness.

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