NORTH Yorkshireman Nikolai Foster has cut a festive dash with his grand winter shows at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, from A Christmas Carol to Annie, The Musical to White Christmas.

He returns to Yorkshire with a show on a smaller scale, a Courtyard play at close quarters rather than a Quarry Theatre extravaganza, with a running time of 90 minutes (including an interval) in keeping with that compact configuration.

Foster is now the artistic director of Leicester’s Curve theatre, where his production of The Witches made its debut in 2015 before heading off on a tour that took in Hong Kong as well as Britain. He has re-directed the Curve and Rose Theatre, Kingston co-production show for its Playhouse debut, using a new troupe of actors in the actor-musician framework for David Wood’s faithful, late-1980s’ stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s scariest fantasy story that puts the emphasis on mischievous, macabre storytelling and Dougal Irvine’s music.

There is still spectacle and illusion too, but it is apt that the story rules in a centenary show to mark Dahl’s wonderfully imaginative writing and gift for comedy and horror.

Last September’s York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre production of The Witches had a whole host of witches – some male and hairy-legged in women’s skirts – vacating stalls seats en masse to join their annual meeting in a shabbily grand Eastbourne hotel, duly putting you on edge with that sudden revelation.

York Press:

Fox Jackson Keen’s acrobatic Boy Mouse

Foster’s show relies instead on a cast of only seven, playing multi-roles and multiple instruments after entering through the auditorium, led by Sarah Ingram’s flamboyantly European Grand High Witch, with her fiendish plan to rid the world of all detestable children, starting with Fox Jackson Keen’s acrobatic Boy and Jonny Weldon’s spoilt brat, food-guzzling Bruno, who both happen to be staying at the hotel.

We see the world through orphan Boy’s eyes after he loses his parents in a car crash and has his imagination fuelled by his caring but somewhat weird Nordic grandma (Jenna Augen), who feeds his mind with warnings of witches’ desires to squish and squiggle all children to death.

Isla Shaw’s set design, with its spiral staircase, branches and piano, feeds that imagination too, switching smoothly between hotel and home, outdoors and indoors, and it becomes even more effective when the Grand High Witch transforms the Boy and Bruno into mice, bringing a different scale into play with large pieces of food etcetera.

This adds physicality to the comedy, which grows stronger as the show progresses, particularly in Weldon’s performance, as he and Boy strive to thwart the witches’ plans, while Irvine’s songs have plenty of comic impact too.

The only loss through the small cast numbers is the scariness that a full coven of witches would bring, but the performance of Ingram amply compensates.

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