AS last year, York has served up to two overlapping interpretations of the Dickens Christmas chestnut, one from Nightshade Productions, and then this one, The Flanagan Collective’s party piece. The one with the two-course meal, the sing-along Christmas songs and carols and half-time parlour games.

Both shows have moved on, the spookier Nightshade leaving behind the streets for the sombre-clocked Guildhall council chamber, armed with a revised script and new cast of 11, while the boisterous Flanagan two-hander has switched from The Lamb and Lion snug in High Petergate to the The Gillygate on, yes, Gillygate.

It is a snug fit once more, the audience of 20 or so packed cheek by other type of cheek around the walls in one of the coaching-house rooms undergoing a new life under Brian Furey’s management.

We had been met in the bar by the host of Christmas past, John Holt-Roberts, who returns to his jocund, cajoling role as MC Jacob Marley. His Marley may be unencumbered by chains or any vestiges of ghostliness but is determined to spark a chain reaction in the night’s revellers, who must play their part as much as the 2013 show’s new Ebenezer Scrooge, Dan “Tall As a Tree” Wood.

Holt-Roberts’s Marley had warned of a “bad case of the humbug. Ah, humbug, step this way, please. Sure enough, Wood’s Scrooge is looking grumpy as a Monday morning as he bursts through the assembled throng gathered at his door, the curt curmudgeon reluctantly agreeing to us joining him in his parlour.

Atmospherically dark walled, but warmer than Scrooge might approve, it is lit with table candles and low lights; there’s a piano in the corner and you just know the doors at either end promise surprises.

Talking of surprises, you won’t be seeing any Dickensian ghosts of past, present or future in the conventional sense in Tom Bellerby’s production. Yet Holt-Roberts and Wood – who incidentally would make an excellent Watson and Holmes – will evoke the spectre of all three spirits through their actions and reactions, driven by the ebullient yet still grave storytelling of Holt Roberts.

Wood’s miserable miser in a nightgown has something of John Cleese’s irascibility about him, and that Basil Fawlty characteristic of desperately trying to retain control and authority while sensing the world and everyone in it is against him. Or conspiring to have fun at his expense, which we certainly are, because the audience is in cahoots with ring-master Holt-Roberts, taking on roles at the drop of a hat on the head.

Flanagan Collective writer Alexander Wright calls his Dickens adaptation “lovingly bastardised”, and yes, he is cavalier in his irreverence, but this roustabout show has the spirit of Christmas, characters come alive as vividly as the half-time mulled wine, and you can feel the love too, from one quick-witted writer to his Victorian forerunner.

The audience camaraderie goes up a notch in the interval, where even Wood’s piano-playing, juggling Scrooge must forego his regulation gruel in the face of a feast of beef, turkey, chips, black pudding, fashionable foreign breads, pork pie, cheese, vegetarian pasties, and on-trend filo-pastry mince pies from John Griffiths’ kitchen.

The audience is invited to tell jokes, do party pieces and accompany guitar-playing Holt-Roberts in singing Walking In The Air and that Slade Christmas number, and then suddenly darkness descends again before the exuberant finale has you wanting to join Wood’s leaping Scrooge in the Gillygate street to tell everyone to book early for this Dickens dinner date.

The Flanagan Collective, A Christmas Carol, The Gillygate pub, York, until December 23, then December 27 to 30, 8pm, with two course-dinner. Box office: 01904 654103.