THIS marvel of a macabre musical production may have begun life at Birmingham Repertory Theatre last December, but it is truly a Yorkshire success story.

Director Nikolai Foster, writer Bryony Lavery and composer and lyricist Jason Carr all have roots in the Broad Acres, and they have created the most audacious of Christmas ghost stories, one that is serious and grave and ghoulish, but ultimately redemptive and uplifting.

If negotiating the icy slopes of the Playhouse car park were not enough to make you nervous, the deafening, crash-bang that opens the play will jolt you into the Dickensian world conjured by Foster and designer Colin Richmond in their seventh collaboration.

Leaving behind the chilly outside for the instantly chilling inside, the heart is already racing as spotlights pick out three grey ghosts spread around the Quarry auditorium: a Napoleonic soldier (Vlach Ashton), a nurse from the Great War (Vicki Lee Taylor) and a modern spectre in T-shirt, jeans and spiked hair (Paul Ryan Carberry).

Lavery’s script has this mini-Greek chorus steering Philip Whitchurch’s Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey to open his eyes, heart and conscience. Whereas Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the driving force in his self-destruction, increasingly hearing only what he wants to hear in the forewarnings of the witches, Scrooge is very much being taught a lesson here. Pulled around like a puppet, he has to respond to the haunting promptings of not only this meddling trio, but also the harrowing, decaying appearance of his late partner Jacob Marley (Paul Leonard), who rises from the grave inside the pit of Scrooge’s bed in a spectacularly spooky coup de theatre.

Then come the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Rob Compton), Present (Dale Meeks) and Yet To Come (Vlach Ashton), each entry more spectacular than the last, especially the winged creature from the future, all the more terrifying for Guy Hoare’s shadowy lighting.

Yet the visual flair is never at the expense of the dark storytelling or the character arc of Whitchurch’s deeply troubled Scrooge as he learns the error of his ways. Writer, director, designers and lead actor are all on top form in a parable that chimes with our age of opprobrium for the greedy and the money-obsessed and the rising need to help others through straitened times.

Carr’s music of the night is not as memorable as the clout of Lavery’s writing or the rapier direction of Foster, but nevertheless it is a welcome fifth gear for the show’s dramatic force, heightening the emotions still more.

Christmas family shows can soften stories like the chewing of a humbug but this version of A Christmas Carol is all the better for being scary, less humorous than usual and free of cloying sentimentality. A spectral, spectacular success.

•Suitable for seven-year-olds and upwards.

• A Christmas Carol, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until January 15. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk