EDINBURGH’S Royal Lyceum Theatre seems disturbingly intimate when viewed from the stage. The casual observer has time to admire the plush velvet seating, the gorgeous crystal chandelier, the way the very seats, all 658 of them, seem to crowd forward onto the proscenium arch.

It’s difficult, really, to stand on the stage and not think about the many actors who have walked across it - Marlene Dietrich, for one, Sir Ian McKellen, for another - or about the hundreds of productions - A Doll’s House, The Merchant of Venice, Arms and the Man, A View from the Bridge,that have lured people onto these 658 seats over the decades.

The other people on the stage at this precise moment, though, have little time for such niceties. There’s a Christmas family show to be getting on with, and much work remains to be done.

On one recent lunchtime, choreographer Emma Jayne Park was overseeing a scene in which five of the cast operated Arabian-themed doors on castors. The doors are heavy, the choreography has to be precise. “This is,” she tells them at one point, “the most physical thing you will have to do in the entire production.”

This is the actors’ first time on the Lyceum stage in this particular show, The Arabian Nights. The director, Joe Douglas, who has spoken of his desire for the show to offer “colour, heat, magic, adventure and song”, watches intently from one of the theatre boxes before making his way onto the stage to talk to Emma and the cast.

At 1.30 or thereabouts there’s a break for lunch - across the road, at the Lyceum’s rehearsal studios - before work resumes in the afternoon. It’s a lot of labour, for just one scene. That’s the way it has to be. Around the actors, the set - Baghdad market-place - is taking shape. The frame of the proscenium arch will be re-furnished with Arabian-themed designs. Fluttering, slender Arabian banners hanging at the side of the stage will mimic the movement of a magic carpet.

The Arabian Nights has been written by Suhayla El-Bushra and has its preview this Saturday before opening its run on Thursday. Ahead of the cast stretch 20 evening performances and 18 matinees, all the way through to January 6.

“In the scene you’ve just been watching,” Douglas says now, “Scheherazade has worked her way into the Sultan’s palace and into his charms. He’s beguiled by her and by her storytelling. At this point she’s searching through the palace on an ulterior motive, which is to find her mum, who’s imprisoned somewhere.

“There’s a lot of story-telling in the first half, the exposition, that sense of setting up the stories,” he adds. “The second act is where all of that preparatory work in the story pays off. There are more musical than physical set-piece numbers in the second half, and that [the doors scene] is one of them, and it will hopefully be impressive once it is fluid.

“I guess that’s the balance for me and the rest of the team, working out where it’s worth spending the time that you’ve got, because time’s such a big resource. Mark [Doubleday, the lighting designer] was saying that time is so expensive in theatre, because there are so many people that you have to all focus. It’s about working out and being quite as incisive as you can, in terms of use of people’s time.”

The Arabian Nights is of course one of many family shows competing for attention at this time of year. Most towns will be staging their own pantos; most cities have several to choose from. This year’s crop includes lots of names familiar from our own long-vanished childhoods: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast. Whatever their subject, the sheer labour they entail - the initial idea, the script, the music, the lighting, the set design, the rehearsals, and all the other things that go into a successful festive show - necessarily goes back many months.

Douglas, for his part, says he first got involved in The Arabian Nights “a year ago, pretty much. Last year’s Christmas show, Alice in Wonderland, had just opened, and David [Greig, artistic director and joint chief executive at the Lyceum] had sort of mentioned it to me before but then he officially asked me to come on board, and that’s when I first met Suhayla. We both met David and talked about the show.

“The idea of the market-place as the setting was something that we committed to do, quite early on. Everything else fell out of Suhayla’s head and we’ve been working closely with her, crafting all the moments that go up to make the show.”

The Arabian Nights themselves, of course, yield a thousand and one stories, but only a select handful could be chosen for this show. “Actually, early on, we thought that Aladdin is maybe not as interesting as a story because it is so well known, and because it has been so well done by Disney, but we have nice allusions to it in the show, but it’s on the periphery of our story.

“Most of our stories are rooted in the original tales of the Arabian Nights,” he continues, “but Suhayla has put her own spin on them; she has changed some of the titles, she has made the women more empowered than in the stories. She hasn’t prescribed how they should be told; that’s where I and Francis [O’Connor, designer] come in.”

A lot of the young cast are first-timers. “The casting was interesting, actually,” Douglas observes. He says he was at pains to make the market-place “as much Baghdad as it is the Barras, in terms of that sense of common humanity, using some of the costume elements and the scenic elements and the shapes and the patterns that come out of the Arabic culture from across the centuries.

“It’s very much an imagined version of Baghdad. Having said that, it was very important to me that we had a diverse cast. For them also to be Scottish was key for me as well, because it feels like we’re getting to a point now in Scotland where we are getting brilliant performers who are coming through who are Scottish but are as likely to have darker brown skin, or black skin, as white. As Scotland is changing, it was important to me that that was reflected on stage.”

He has been true to his word: the 10-strong cast includes Nebli Basani, Humera Syed, Neshla Caplan and Rehanna Macdonald, who plays Scheherazade.

I’d naively thought that the preparations would be completed long before the preview, with everything set in stone. Not so. Actual prep for the show can continue “until five minutes before the preview,” Douglas confirms with a quick laugh. “It’s going to be really up against it. This is a big show to take on for Christmas, especially in the way we’re telling it, with live music, live puppetry, bits of magic, lots of different effects. And, of course, the choreography takes time, it has to be precise. Once the previews begin, we’ll be honing and honing and honing.”

That very morning, he had been texted some script updates by El-Bushra herself. “Often with a Christmas show,” he says, “you’re working with an existing script, and I can imagine this particular script going on to have lots and lots of productions. It will start here but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still being performed somewhere in twenty years’ time, actually. Which is a brilliant thing for the Lyceum to have created and to have given the theatre a new version of this story.

“With any play, and we’re treating this as a new play, you try to make sure the story is as clear as possible, that the characters are following the right beats that the story needs.”

The spacious rehearsal room is awash with props, tables, musical instruments. Outdoor clothes are draped over the backs of chairs. There are open laptops next to a bowl of apples and a packet of Cadbury’s Fingers. Some old seats from the Lyceum itself line the walls. Douglas walks over to a rather striking 1:25 scale model of the stage. “It will be really good,” he says of the stage, “once the banners are in, and the market-place comes forward, and the actors are playing instruments on stage, and you see the full effect of the lighting. The proscenium we’re putting in will be illuminated, so that it will look a bit like a light-box.

“You have to make sure there’s enough going on for everyone in the audience, whatever their sightline,” he continues. “You have to keep things moving on stage.”

Since that day, work has continued ceaselessly on the production. Last Friday, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and a company of excited schoolchildren, witnessed the dress rehearsal. Tradition dictates that preparations will go on almost until the final moment before Thursday's opening show. But then, as tradition also dictates, once the curtain finally goes up, everything will be all right on the night, too.