THIS is Chris Monks’s first Christmas production at the SJT since succeeding Sir Alan Ayckbourn as artistic director.

While the ghosts of Ayckbourn family shows past haunt A Christmas Carol in the use of trapdoors, dry ice and travels through time, Monks also reveals the spirit of Christmas future by bringing his own distinguishing features as writer-director to Dickens’s Victorian tale.

These are essentially twofold. Firstly, he combines repertory actors with young community players (two alternating troupes of eight playing myriad chorus roles) to bring a local flavour to the performance.

Secondly, he enhances that flavour by playing on Dickens’s connections with Yorkshire, both Scarborough (not mentioned in the show) and Malton, which certainly is and duly provides plenty of the comedy.

The character of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (Kraig Thornber) is reputedly based on a Malton bookkeeper of Dickens’s acquaintance, and so Monks makes a speculative leap by giving Scrooge a character-shaping Yorkshire childhood.

On Scrooge’s nocturnal transportation to Christmas past on one long, magical night, he is shown his younger self in the market town, a place of cobbles and glistening ice in Sue Condie’s set design.

To complement this, Paul Stear’s video projections play on the in-the-round dimensions of the SJT by being beamed as a circle on to the floor.

This is particularly effective in the depiction of the motions of time and of over-lapping clock faces or figures from Scrooge’s past.

The three ghosts all provide surprises – wait and see! – and each arrival has a bigger impact, as should be the case, but nevertheless the visual spectacle falls short of Northern Ballet Theatre’s celebrated production (now running at Leeds Grand Theatre until December 10).

For all the economy of the scene changes (the Cratchit house, for example, is appropriately rudimentary), the show needs more momentum and greater flights of drama. The personable performances of Keith Woodason’s Bob Cratchit and Maeve Larkin’s Mrs Fred and the cheery community performers are a plus point, but Thornber’s Scrooge could be darker and more distinctive in his characterisation, although he plays on the humorous aspects of Monks’s script to good effect.

Ultimately, this is a solid rather than outstanding journey into the Dickensian world, a little sweeter on the tooth than usual, like the Bah humbugs being liberally distributed on press night.

A Christmas Carol, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until January 9 Box office: 01723 370541