Scrooge liked darkness - "darkness was cheap". He would have approved of the condition of the Playhouse which has remained dark these past three years, shuttered and barred like the greatest hulk of humbug in the city.
Now the chains are off and the ghosts have come flying out of the closet. Dickens's seasonal warning of an excessively parsimonious past is the perfect reawakening for Liverpool's dormant repertory tradition, founded in 1911 and the oldest in the country.
Rep has had a rough ride here in recent years. In the 1980s Alan Bleasdale and Willie Russell had their hands on the Playhouse tiller, but in the 1990s local-born impresario Bill Kenwright had to bail it out. The new Liverpool and Merseyside Theatres Trust has fused the operation with the equally erratic Everyman, and will be hoping that the return of home-grown theatre adds impetus to the Liverpool renaissance.
Productions of this quality are a promising start. Richard Williams, a former artistic director of the Playhouse, has staged his own adaptation of the tale with a rhetorical fizz to match the pugnacity of the original. Dickens's dramatic enthusiasms are written into the pulse of his prose - we are reminded that the author's one-man rendition of his text was a tour de force of rhetorical theatre. This staging astutely disperses the authorial voice throughout the acting ensemble, rather than simply gutting the book for dialogue. It captures the simmering sense of a social tract dressed in the trappings of Yuletide celebration.
It is a suitably murky pea-souper of a production. David Collis's grim, portcullis-like design suggests the prisons and workhouses so approved of by Scrooge. And Stephen McNeff's fine, eclectic music keeps a large ensemble of muffler-clad actor-musicians milling around evocatively.
Through the middle of it all scuttles the spidery presence of Bob Goody's superlative Scrooge. Goody resists the temptation to ham up the part; indeed there is scarcely an ounce of flesh on his skeletal shanks. With his high-rise forehead and lank stringy hair, Goody never plays Scrooge explicitly for laughs but with the realisation that he must chart a clear moral course between misanthropy and munificence in what is a curiously godless unchristian tale.
Dickens taught us how to celebrate the modern Christmas, yet in doing so distanced it from its religious foundation. Do more people now believe in Marley's ghost than the virgin birth? As any good Dickensian agnostic would note: bah humbug.
• Until January 13. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
