As a politically engaged playwright, David Edgar (Destiny, Maydays) is ideal to mine the hard stones of social campaigning Dickens hid within his seasonal treat. But with the chancellor of the exchequer playing Scrooge to reverse his predecessor’s spooking of the markets, and old Ebenezer’s dismissal of charity and compassion seemingly the template for the home secretary, Edgar’s version bites even more than at its 2017 premiere and 2018 revival. Struggling to prevent their children starving, the Cratchits feel ever less fictionally and historically distant.

The joy of the show, though, comes from the seamlessness of Edgar’s donnish sub-text – a framing device has Dickens outlining and improvising the story to his publisher – and the exuberant visual spectacle of Rachel Kavanaugh’s staging, incorporating illusions (by Ben Hart and RSC Production Video) including one transformation that achieves a gasp of joyous shock matching the sudden audience jump in The Woman in Black.

Adrian Edmondson’s Scrooge seems to be twice channelling Roald Dahl: the pre-dreams Ebenezer, inflected by the great children’s writer’s curmudgeonly and bigoted public persona, but the reformed Scrooge suggesting the twinkly eccentricity of Dahl’s Willy Wonka. In line with the script’s sharp eye on our times – Edgar names two incidental characters Mrs Snapchat and Herr Uber – Edmondson stresses more than most versions that the character is not a wretched miser but a canny entrepreneur leveraging debt for profit.