I confess to dereliction of a critic’s duty in respect of the scratch ’n’ sniff aspect of the entertaining new stage version of David Walliams’s children’s book Mr Stink. Sharon Gold, of Celessence Technologies, had equipped the scratchcards distributed to every member of the audience with such a potent impression of the odour emanating from the title character’s rotting boots that I was unwilling to sample what she had devised for his thunderous burp and a worse bodily eruption that followed.

Around me in the stalls delighted youngsters had no such reservations, relishing the opportunity for comical crudery with, for once, the apparent sanction of their parents. To be fair to the adapter and director Matthew White, this was far from distasteful entertainment, such vulgarity as it contained being more than balanced by the essential decency of the story being told.

What we are shown is an unlikely, but heart-warming, account of a friendship that grows up between the old tramp of the title (played by Peter Edbrook, above) and a 12-year-old schoolgirl Chloe Crumb (Lotte Gilmore). In her own way, she is something of an outsider, too, being bullied at school and bossed around at home by a martinet mother (Julia J. Nagle). Mrs Crumb (say ‘Croom’) is a Tory politician in the mould of Mrs Thatcher. One certainly wonders how she came to marry her good-sort, former rock guitarist husband (Mark Peachey).

Excellent puppetry from Toby Olié brought us a wonderfully convincing canine companion, the Duchess (above), for Mr Stink, as well as Chloe’s odious younger sister, voiced by Steve Blacker. Catchy tunes from composer Matt Brind added to the fun but were played rather too loudly for my liking.

The performances, on Tuesday and Wednesday, were followed by a chance for the audience to meet ‘real’ homeless people through the agency of The Big Issue and Oxford Homeless Pathways. This lent an extra dimension to a valuable production that usefully addressed a serious social problem.