He has long written Christmas ghost stories for television and now Mark Gatiss is to adapt one of the most celebrated of them all for the stage. Gatiss will star as the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley, in his own version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The play is to open at Nottingham Playhouse in October and then Alexandra Palace in London at the end of the year.

Gatiss said that Dickens’s novella, which was first published in 1843, “has been absolutely my favourite story since I was, well, tiny. It’s an astonishingly powerful tale of life, love, loss and redemption and remains supremely relevant. But at its heart it is a ghost story and that will be at the core of my new version. A scary, thrilling, joyous adventure to get the blood piping on a freezing winter’s night. A Victorian phantasmagoria!”

A Christmas Carol was adapted for BBC One last year, with Guy Pearce in the lead role, and remains a perennially popular festive production in theatres, too. Jack Thorne’s version has returned to the Old Vic for two consecutive years since its premiere in 2017 and also had a run on Broadway. Piers Torday’s radical reworking, Christmas Carol – A Fairy Tale, which focuses on Ebenezer Scrooge’s sister, Fan, was staged at Wilton’s Music Hall in London last year, while Tony Cownie’s An Edinburgh Christmas Carol, staged at the Royal Lyceum, brought the story back to the city where Dickens was believed to have first stumbled across a memorial to Ebenezer Scroggie, providing inspiration for his tale.

Gatiss’s version will be directed by Adam Penford, Nottingham Playhouse’s artistic director, who collaborated with him in 2018 on The Madness of George III. The new show was announced on Monday, along with other Nottingham Playhouse productions including Choir Boy, written by the Oscar-winning Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight), which will open in 2021.

Opening alongside A Christmas Carol this October at the Playhouse will be a new drama about the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, who led the Jarrow march and introduced free milk in schools as education secretary. Red Ellen was written by Caroline Bird and will be directed by Wils Wilson.