Clementine Scott

Haven’t we all wanted to have a chat with our inner child at some point? And what if the inner child is not quite as faultless and innocent as we may think?

The stage is immediately set for a confrontation. We the audience are looking down the length of a Victorian dining table, lit from beneath, poised perfectly for domestic rows to erupt before the meal is even served.

Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats. But in the case of Richard Eyre’s 1994 La traviata, the old adage might be true: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Lyle Kessler’s Orphans was first performed in 1983, but you wouldn’t know that from this production. The tiny stage feels overcome by Sarah Beaton’s design, retro but not too retro, a space immune to the passing decades.

Twenty or so dancers parade before an oversized Art Deco clock, to the familiar strains of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from a brass band offstage. In other words, the stage is set for a reassuringly old-fashioned taste of the Golden Age of movie musicals.

Indian Ink is not among Tom Stoppard’s greatest plays. The tale of a literary darling moving to 1930s India is awkwardly structured and hamfisted in its messages about Indian identity. Yet this revival breathes new life into the lesser-known work.

An ominous small town tension, the lingering fear that something rotten lies beneath the wholesome community spirit, pervades KENREX, which transfers to London after an acclaimed Sheffield Theatres run.

We’re in a room straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest, two couples sipping Scotch on mid-century chaise longues. Like most plays set entirely in someone’s living room, though, fault lines amidst the middle-class domestic bliss soon emerge.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula can actually be quite funny. There’s the cowboy who’s inexplicably present in 19th-century Yorkshire, and how Jonathan Harker sees nothing wrong with doing routine real estate transactions at a remote Transylvanian castle. Unfortunately, Dracapella has channelled precisely none of this.

In an age of transphobic fearmongering about any drag queen daring to perform in front of children, acknowledging the fact that British family entertainment has always been queer feels more important than ever. He’s Behind You takes this one step further, extending the concept of queer adult panto to its full, glorious potential.

The Christmas Thing is a variety show with a little too much variety, and sometimes feels like a showcase for its talented performers (and perhaps a few game audience members) rather than a standalone show.

This is a tale exhilaratingly told, and if it fails it fails for being too inventive, rather than not inventive enough.

This David Copperfield is far more than a cheap facsimile of its source material. There is room here for all the observational humour of Dickens’ writing, but also for all the pains and lessons of growing up.

Few Shakespeare plays have received the ‘updated for the current political moment’ treatment more than Julius Caesar. In Petty Men, though, our Roman dictator-for-life is not a Trumpian autocrat, but a BAFTA-winning actor.

If you’ve ever worked a remote job, and been strapped for cash, you’ll recognise the temptation to take on additional casual work on the side. Isley Lynn and Libby Rodliffe take this concept to its extreme in their one-woman show, Jobsworth.

Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware.

What do we do when the world is falling apart around us? We sing. Cloying though that sentiment may be, in the hands of the team of five devisers behind Precipice, it’s anything but.