Betty Blue Eyes musical hams it up in the West End – in pictures

Cameron Mackintosh's first new full-scale show for a decade, Betty Blue Eyes, is one of the most intriguing musicals ever to have opened in the West End (and that's considering that one of his previous projects was a musical adaptation of Moby-Dick, fatally harpooned by terrible reviews) Photograph: Jeff Blackler/Rex Features

Set in a small Yorkshire town and based on Alan Bennett's 1984 film A Private Function, it described as an 'utterly British musical, full of eccentric characters' Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The action is set in 1947, in a bleak austerity-era Britain brightened only by the prospect of a royal wedding (any resemblance to the present day is, of course, coincidental). Here are Sarah Lancashire as Joyce Chilvers and Ann Emery as the engagingly entitled Mother Dear Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex Features

Despite being blighted by postwar food rationing and the coldest winter in decades, the town's citizens resolve to hold a party, which means slaughtering an illegally raised pig. Everything looks set – until, that is, someone steals the pig Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex Features

Thus the real star of the show is already Betty herself – not a real pig, but an animatronic creature built in Australia and voiced by fellow Aussie Kylie Minogue (there are in fact no fewer than four pigs in the show, used in rotation) Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

. 'A real pig would have cost more than Michael Crawford in Phantom of the Opera,' says Mackintosh Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Tristram Kenton

The man entrusted with the all-important pig-napping is mild-mannered chiropodist Gilbert Chilvers, played by Reece Shearsmith (best known for TV's The League of Gentlemen), seen here alongside Sarah Lancashire (best known for her turn in Corrie) Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Fortunately – this being musical-land – all ends happily, with a final number in which the cast bid a not-so-fond farewell to austerity Britain Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Betty Blue Eyes goes on show to the press tonight, and is running at the Novello theatre in London's West End Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian