AFTER their first collaboration last year for Nobby Dimon’s reinvention of Lorca’s Spanish world as A Blood Wedding In Wensleydale, North Country Theatre reunites with Harrogate Theatre for The Rocking Horse Winner.

Adapted and directed once more by NCT’s artistic director and founder, the play is based on that rarity in the canon of DH Lawrence: a psychological thriller.

“It’s a short story and a supernatural story; in fact, as far as I know, no other Lawrence story contains elements of the supernatural,” says Nobby, whose touring production opens in Harrogate tonight.

“He wrote it in 1920 and it was first published in Harper’s Bazaar before being anthologised in his collection of short stories – and though it’s an oddity, it does tie in with what we associate with Lawrence: mothers and sons, repressed feelings and hints of Freudian and Jungian psychology when they were at the height of their fame.”

In Lawrence’s story, the aforementioned horse is forever whispering “there must be more money” in the ear of young Paul Lobell, in his nursery, bedroom or library or on the staircase, morning, noon and night. How far will the sinister old horse take him on a wild ride, against a backdrop of race meetings, jockeys, touts and bookies? All will be revealed in a satirical, witty yet dark drama told with the Richmond company’s customary theatrical inventiveness.

“There was a film version, made in 1949, that I remember watching as a child and being frightened because I was nine or ten and it presented an image of a disturbed ten-year-old boy,” says Nobby. “That imagery stuck in my mind and then I re-discovered the story in a collection of ghost stories and so I’ve wanted to adapt it for a long time.”

His biggest challenge was to settle on how the central character of the ten-year-old Paul should be played. “One of the first ideas we had was that this character at the beginning should be much older but frozen in time in a mental institution,” says Nobby. “Hence we see him 15 years later, when his mind is still locked in the events of the story.

“We explore that story through the device of psychologically looking at the boy’s situation, trying to analyse his state of mind.

“In many ways you can see parallels with Peter Shaffer’s Equus and the idea of horses as subconscious images in our minds.”

The supernatural will play its part in NCT’s scary, even disturbing production. “The play asks if the boy is just lucky when he comes up with winners in the races or does he do it by supernatural means?” says Nobby. “The story leaves it open, but you will certainly see some supernatural happenings in our adaptation, so we hope there’ll be one or two moments when the audience will have little shivers up their spine!”

• North Country Theatre’s tour of The Rocking Horse Winner opens at Harrogate Theatre, tonight until Saturday, and will run until December 10. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk See northcountrytheatre.com for the full itinerary.