Reviewed - Kinky Boots: So what are plucky Britishers doing this season to regain dignity and escape exclusion? Stripping? Swimming the channel? Appearing nude in calendars? No. It seems they - or that minority of them laid off from midlands shoe manufacturers - are constructing thigh-high boots for Soho drag queens.

Doesn't have quite the same oomph, does it? The Full Monty would never have been the smash it was if the Sheffield lads had decided to return to the factory and produce a more glamorous class of steel.

Kinky Boots, which is based on some sort of a true story, delivers all the things we expect from this inexplicably resilient genre. Joel Edgerton plays the heir to a Northampton shoemakers, who, after acceding to the throne, discovers that his late father, an evangelist for quality footwear, had little head for business. While brooding on the firm's imminent collapse, he happens upon a cross-dresser named Lola being roughed-up by hooligans. Some time later a light bulb appears above his head.

One of the less enlightened workers suffers ridicule after making a pass at Lola, but is eventually persuaded that masculinity takes many forms. The hero drifts away from his diabolical wife - she prefers London to Northampton and is (hiss!) an estate agent - towards the pretty factory worker who has been under his nose all these years. Lola comes to terms with the contempt his late father felt for him. And so forth.

One feels the urge to praise Chiwetel Ejiofor, ubiquitous this year and always welcome, for his brave performance as Lola. But, though Ejiofor retains his dignity and radiates charisma, he is, for a Soho cabaret artiste, desperately short of fabulousness. Still, he is just good enough to stop Kinky Boots from becoming, ahem, total cobblers.