For a show which follows the predictable seasonal quest for 'the spirit of Christmas', Lyceum Theatre and Catherine Wheels' Christmas Dinner is oddly low on warmth and soul, but very high on intellectual post-modernism. By turns enjoyable, witty and clever (with superb, if direct and exaggerated performances from the ensemble), Christmas Dinner makes a great deal of the magic of theatre without ultimately discovering it in its own story.

Robert Alan Evans' script is a sophisticated delight. Entwining the stories of an emotionally frozen stage manager and a theatre that is slowly dying due to a lack of productions (a nod to the consequences of Covid), it relocates Christmas away from either the church or high street and into the theatre: the five festive ghosts include an old-school actor and a gushing critic. And it is the performance of a Christmas dinner, rather than the thing itself, that provides emotional resolution. Alongside A Lament For Sheku Bayoh (hosted at the Lyceum during the Edinburgh International Festival) and Wils Wilson's Life Is A Dream, the Lyceum has presented a trilogy of plays which argue for theatre's potential as a focus of the sentiments previously owned by religious practice: Lament's elegiac memorial to a victim of police brutality; Life Is A Dream's metaphysical reflections on determinism, good and evil; and Christmas Dinner's celebration of community and emotional recovery.

The play's argument becomes one for the importance of theatre as a focus for individual redemption while its plot structure follows a path from despairing isolation to social re-integration, as stage manager Lesley (Elicia Daly) slowly comes to terms with the loss of her grandmother through a pointedly allegorical fairy story. This generic seasonal narrative draws on A Christmas Carol but with ghosts that are now theatrical spirits rather than Marley, Present, Past and Future. Dickens' Christian morality is replaced here by a humanistic exploration of myth's power to heal. Fragments of other festive favourites (The Wizard Of Oz, pantomime dames, Babes In The Wood) are scattered across the performance with Richard Conlon's Fruity a fine old ham, while Madame Lady (Florence Odumosu) is a light satire of Scottish critics' propensity to over-rate even those difficult shows that they don't really understand.

If the 'dying theatre' motif comments on the dangers of leaving venues dark for too long, the story insists that theatre also has a social function as Lesley reconciles with her family after receiving a dose of therapeutic storytelling. Diderot's Enlightenment belief that theatre could replace religion in a secular state is enlivened with Jung's contention that mythology can be used as a cure for spiritual sickness. This is heady material for a children's show, and executed with literary panache supported by an impressive ensemble performance. Sita Pieraccini articulates an immediate connection with the audience as Bird Girl, managing to combine a smiling warmth with the precision of a ballet dancer while Ronan McMahon imbues Billy with the naïve charm of Cinderella's Buttons. And in Madame Lady, Odumosu discovers a fluttering, flattering humour that is simultaneously compassionate and satirical of critical pretension.

And yet the production itself lacks a necessary immediacy to connect with the audience's younger members. A moment borrowed from Peter Pan does not elicit the passion that would revive Tinkerbell, and a final phone call by Lesley to her family does not express the wonderful redemption that she discovered through seeing her story performed in the style of Boal's Theatre Of The Oppressed.

The humour is either too subtle or overly satirical to promote energetic responses of pantomime revelry and its theme of emotional frigidity from grief is too serious to resolve into the genial jollity of festive cheer. Christmas Dinner is an erudite treat that dallies with weighty concerns and takes the power of performance very seriously, but for all its focus on compassion and theatre's magic, it never quite launches into delirious abandon of the season.

Christmas Dinner, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sunday 2 January.