ALL too rarely does a hit new play have a second chance at the theatre that took the punt on giving it its premiere. Rarer still does it progress from the studio to the main house.

If you are still in the dark about Edith In The Dark, having missed its Christmas birth in 2013, you should make haste to Harrogate Theatre this week for Philip Meeks's sinister ghost play that turns the spotlight on E (for Edith) Nesbit’s prowess as a writer of Victorian gothic grim tales in her twenties, far removed from The Railway Children.

Meeks interweaves Edith's own shadowy, troubled story with four of Nesbit’s ghost stories as Blue Merrick reprises the title role, newly joined by Patrick Neyman as the mysterious stranger and fixated fan Mr Guasto and Nicky Goldie as tipple-loving Biddy Thricefold, Edith's housekeeper, on Christmas Eve 1900.

Alex Swarbrick's design is replicated from the Studio, now less claustrophobic but still creepy in reducing Edith's attic room to see-through slats and crumbling plaster: an echo of Edith’s disturbing childhood encounter with a multitude of skin-stretched mummies in a Bordeaux crypt that she sought to purge in her Tales Of Terror writings.

Blue Merrick is magnificent once more, her bitterly waspish Edith blighted by dark needs, fringed with a twisted, withering wit and a searing intellect in Meeks's psychological drama, supported by Neyman's darkly strange Guasto and Goldie's amusing Biddy under Keith Hukin's gothic direction.

Edith In The Dark, Harrogate Theatre, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk