THE West End gala opening of Great Expectations at the Vaudeville Theatre will be screened via satellite at City Screen, York, from 6.45pm on Thursday.

The Coney Street cinema will be one of more than 150 in Britain and Ireland and another 450 in mainland Europe, Canada, the United States, Asia and Australia that will show the premiere to mark Charles Dickens’s birthday.

Launching alongside the stage show will be the Dickens Legacy, which will receive a royalty share of box office.

Set up by the producer Bruce Athol MacKinnon with Lucinda Dickens Hawksley – Dickens’s great great great grand-daughter – it will distribute funds to organisations that deal with issues that animated Dickens, such as prison reform, adoption and literacy.

The Dickens Legacy also will support Tuesday evening performances at the London theatre when, subject to availability, every full-price adult ticket holder can be accompanied by a child aged under 16 for free.

Great Expectations has had incarnations as a film, television drama and even a stage musical, but Graham McLaren’s production is the first to present Dickens’s novel as a full-scale stage play in either the West End or on Broadway.

The London première will star Paula Wilcox as Miss Havisham, Jack Ellis as Jaggers and Chris Ellison as Magwitch, joined in the cast of 13 by Paul Nivison as Adult Pip, Grace Rowe as Estella and Taylor Jay-Davies as Young Pip.

Originally published between December 1 1860 and August 3 1861, Great Expectations has been adapted for the stage by Scottish playwright Jo Clifford, who has worked in theatre for more than 30 years. Clifford has written 80 plays, first as John Clifford, most notably for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, then transiting to Jo, since when she has adapted Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard for Theatre Alba at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2010 and 2011.

Director and costume designer McClaren has put together a production team of fellow costume designer Annie Gosney, set designer Robin Peoples, lighting designer Kai Fischer, composer Simon Slater and sound designer by Matt McKenzie.

Giovanni Bedin, head couturier for House Of Worth, has worked with Annie Gosney on Estella’s couture gowns for the show. Charles Frederick Worth, the world’s first official couturier, was a contemporary of Charles Dickens.

• Tickets for Thursday’s York screening can be booked on 0871 902 5726 or picturehouses.co.uk/york; tickets for Great Expectations at the Vaudeville Theatre, Strand, London, 0844 412 4663.