NIGHTSHADE Productions keep you on the move in their dramas as much as they do in their other nocturnal pursuit: a ghost walk under the guise of the York Terror Trail.

Producer, director and writer Damian Freddi has a habit of returning each Christmas to the pages of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, each time taking infamous miser Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey of redemption and enlightenment to a new setting.

In 2012, it was a promenade through the streets of York, ginnels and Newgate marketplace for a grim-up-north rather than London town Scrooge; in 2013, Nightshade made York theatre history by mounting the first stage show in the York Guildhall’s old council chamber.

In 2014, Freddi’s company took over over a former school outfitters’ shop in Colliergate for a site-specific production that transformed the vacated Rawcliffe’s into Scrooge and Marley’s dingy business premises.

Each of these shows had involved audience members gathering in the winter chill outside the Golden Fleece, Nightshade’s traditional assembly point before presenting the opening scenes on York’s streets.

York Press:

Graham Rollinson as Scrooge in Nightshade Productions' A Christmas Carol at Kirkagte, York Castle Museum

By comparison, by presenting A Christmas Carol on Kirkgate, the Victorian street and shop frontages in York Castle Museum, everything is brought indoors, streets and all, but the two-hour show remains a peripatetic production with the audience never allowed to settle for long, just like Scrooge on his night of terrors before Christmas Day.

The warmth of the museum is soon forgotten, and the season’s decorative flourish of garlands, holly and a huge Christmas tree seeps into the background as Gavin Brooks’s cautionary Narrator sets the chilly yet immersive scene on the cobbled streets to the accompaniment of street-life sound effects, clattering carriage wheels and distant, muffled Christmas carols.

Candles flicker eerily in the windows above the shops as Graham Rollinson’s Scrooge hurrumphs and hurries into the street, and from here on he will never be off his feet, never seen a-bed in nightgown and nightcap, never out of his coat and hat.

This restless theatrical device matches Scrooge’s state of mind, jolted both by Brooks’s Narrator in the disruptive manner of Shakespeare’s Puck and by Mark Hindman-Smith’s chain-rattling ghost of Jacob Marley, whose alarmist voice is the essence of last-chance foreboding.

What follows from Freddi’s ghost-walk company is a ghost walk of sorts, or more precisely three ghost walks through Scrooge’s life with the Spirits of Christmas Past (a white-clad, bedraggled Gemma-Louise Keane), Present (Lorna Ward in Christmas red and green) and black-hooded Yet To Come (wait and see) that brings him into contact with his younger self (the excellent Richard Thirlwall); abandoned true love Belle (Elanor Dunn); Bob Cratchit (Thirlwall again) and plenty more besides.

Humour plays its part, not least in a cross-dressed Freddi cameo, but misery, mystery, magic and ultimate redemption drive these Victorian vignettes in the curmudgeonly, then increasingly troubled company of Rollinson’s Scrooge. Exit Sorrow, “on your bike”, and homewards we go aglow with mulled wine and mince pies.

Nightshade Productions in A Christmas Carol, Kirkgate, York Castle Museum; remaining performances, December 14 to 18, 7pm, all sold out.