Every Witch way for director Nikolai Foster in Roald Dahl centenary show

After A Christmas Carol, Annie and White Christmas, now he has directed The Witches, marking the centenary of Roald Dahl with a show for children aged seven and upwards that will run at the Leeds theatre until January 21.

The Witches is a Playhouse co-production with the Rose Theatre, Kingston, and Curve, Leicester, where the Skipton-raised Foster took over as artistic director in January 2015.

"We created the show in 2015 at Curve and then took it to Hong Kong and on a UK tour when James [Playhouse artistic director James Brining] saw it in Liverpool in the spring and thought 'we'd love to have a bit of that in Yorkshire'."

Adapted for the stage by David Wood, the actor-musician show features Sarah Ingram as the Grand High Witch and Fox Jackson Keen as Boy and retains the essence of the original Curve show.

"It has all the Made At Curve look from last year but with a new company of actors, and coming back to it a second time, I've really had the confidence to explore and expand on things, knowing that it works already," says Foster.

"The first production with David Wood's original script in the late-1980s had hundreds of witches and spectacular special effects and all that over-the-top Eighties feel to it, but instead we decided to do it on a smaller scale, using our imagination and trusting Roald Dahl's text, confident that audiences would use their imagination too to respond to a story that is fun, silly and scary.

"We really love the Courtyard as a performance space, which is similar to the 350-seat theatre at Curve, so the audience can feel completely immersed in the show as soon as they come into the auditorium. If a witch is coming towards you, threatening to kill you if you're a child, it really makes you engage with the Boy Mouse and Bruno, wanting them to save the world."

The Witches runs in the Courtyard Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until January 21. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk