Ghosts of the past, eradicated by a monstrous central power, and ruled by a Killer Queen: if it's good enough for Shakespeare, the producers of We Will Rock You, which has run at the Dominion Theatre for nine years and shows no sign of stopping, clearly thought it would serve pretty well for a musical devoted to the memory of Queen. I mean the rock band, not the monarch, though the reverence with which the words "Freddie Mercury" are greeted in these circles is little short of what Claudius would have thought his due.

Oh, what a night. The acreages of the Dominion were jam-packed with coachloads of out-of-towners, teenage boys and serried rows of Russians and Eastern Europeans.

The plot, as my co-critics aged nine and ten observed, is "really rubbish". A world-dominating corporation has homogenised music so far that only internet downloads are allowed and memories of real rock and roll have been erased. The poor drones are so brainwashed they have even forgotten The X Factor and Britney Spears. What do you mean, when can you go there?

Two plucky Bohemians (Ricardo Afonso and Sarah French) are the Papageno and Papagena of the piece, on a quest to break the spell and find the world's remaining electric guitar. The Killer Queen (Brenda Edwards) is out to stop them. We get bursts of Mercury and May's hits belted out fortissimo to hold the slight action together. 

I first heard Bohemian Rhapsody at the age my elder boy is now, and the combination of glam rock laced with Chopin, Mozart and a twirl of the burlesque still works a treat.

It's hard though to take much of a lecture on keeping rock real from a troupe that adjusted nicely from Bohemian rhapsodists of the 1970s to global supergroup of the late 1980s. Even after Freddie's death in 1991 (we're told here he was "wild", not that he died of Aids), the rest chugged on to grace the (other) Queen's Jubilee and The X Factor in true pop Establishment style.

No matter: it was ear-splitting fun remembering Fat-Bottomed Girls and convincing ourselves that We Are the Champions, if only for one night.

At the end of the joyous and downright daft shenanigans, a single line appeared on the stage screen: "Do you still want Bohemian Rhapsody"? Two Russian blokes in front of us were so excited they almost forgot to focus on their illegal recording.

"Yeees!" we shrieked. "Oh all right then," flashed up the reply. So we swayed and ululated along to the oddest, most spell-binding pop song ever written.

If there's a better instant antidote to our own brooding ghosts, I can't tell you where to find it.