Christmas has come early to Scarborough in Alan Ayckbourn's new yuletide comedy — the writer's 71st play. Along with a couple of revivals of earlier Ayckbourn works, it forms the Stephen Joseph Theatre's spookily themed Things That Go Bump season. Sadly, though, there is little here to quicken the pulse. Life & Beth is as cosily predictable, and as dated in feel, as a Seventies sitcom. If there is pleasure to be had here, it resides primarily in the comic brio of the cast, and in the odd instance of sharp repartee.

Beth (played by Liza Goddard) was recently bereaved when her overbearing husband, Gordon, a pettifogging health and safety officer, fell from a ladder at work. Facing her first Christmas as a widow, she must also contend with her nerdish, patronising son Martin, his mute, cowed girlfriend Ella, and Gordon's depressive sister Connie (a bitterly funny Susie Blake).

Connie is a particular worry; her taste for red wine has led her, on a previous festive occasion, to attempt to ride the illuminated flashing reindeer that Gordon always insisted on erecting outside the house.

Beth's main source of comfort - the cat, with which Gordon shared a mutual antipathy — has mysteriously gone missing, and a visit from the oleaginous vicar amorously pressing unwelcome spiritual succour upon her is far from welcome.

Just as it seems that things cannot get any worse, the lights fuse — and there, at the head of the table like the apparition of slaughtered Banquo or some nylon-besuited Spirit of Christmas Present, is Gordon's grinning ghost.

There's a dash of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit to the play, with Beth much put out by her phantom husband's arrival and the vicar acting as a kind of clerical Madame Arcati. The suggestion, in Gordon's account of life after death, that Heaven is like a celestial version of the Civil Service might raise a smile. But even the characters this side of the grave suffer a wraith-like lack of substance, so thinly drawn are they.

Nor do the relationships convince. Ayckbourn implies the tedium and unhappiness of Beth and Gordon's marriage, but offers no explanation about why the perfectly capable and confident-seeming Beth should have tolerated it for so long. Equally, what keeps Martin, clearly following in his father's clod-hoppingly insensitive footsteps, and the miserable Ella together remains a mystery.

Some nifty business with wires and trapdoors lends Ayckbourn's staging the occasional faint frisson of the supernatural, yet the production overall is bedevilled by a serious lack of pace. The actors still succeed in making the best of the lines sting, with Blake's increasingly woozy and rancorous Connie especially diverting. But this is pretty tame entertainment.

Box office: 01723 370541

Editor's choice

• Are Glasvegas the new Oasis?
• Proms Podcast with Stephen Hough
• Vote for musical perfection