The Bush Theatre is becoming a garden centre. Earlier this year, the venue staged Coral Wylie’s Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, which featured an abundance of plant life, and now it’s the turn of talented novelist and screenwriter Danny James King, whose Miss Myrtle’s Garden has Wylie aptly listed as its botanical consultant. 

It’s always a risk when a production changes venue. In the curious alchemy of live performance, no-one can be sure whether a shift in surroundings might rob a show of the glitter and allure it once had.

Terence Rattigan's rehabilitation – some might almost say deification – as a leading 20th century playwright is complete. As well as academic studies, biographies and numerous highly respected revivals of his work, there is a growing clamour to accord him the ultimate, deserved, honour: a theatre bearing his name.

In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her life. Out of their friendship she created Letters from Max, a 2018 book of their correspondence, then a play performed in New York in 2023.

This charmingly eloquent semi-autobiographical show – which first played at the Bush Theatre in 2022 – tells the story of a girl whose life growing up in a council flat is transformed by the arrival of an upright piano. Lylah – like the show’s creator, Anoushka Lucas – is the daughter of an Anglo-Indian father and a French Cameroonian mother, and her subtle, often humorous, exploration of her racial identity becomes intertwined with who she is as a musician.

MOR. Twee. Unashamedly crowdpleasing. Are such descriptors indicative of a tedious night in the stalls? For your reviewer, who has become jaded very quickly with a myriad of searing examinations of mental health crises and wake up calls about the forthcoming environmental collapse, I often find comfort in material more suited to the large print section of the library. But the show still has to be good and that’s a big challenge when dealing with "smaller" subject matter.

As a regular theatregoer, you learn pretty quickly that there’s no story too bizarre to work as a musical. Cannibalistic murders in Victorian London? Faking a miracle in smalltown USA? The westernisation of Japan? And that’s just Sondheim…

How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893 play in under the two-hour mark, no interval. And you can introduce a non-speaking ensemble of women in period bloomers and the like as a silent commentary on the depredations indicated in the text. 

A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge resonates so strongly today.

The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter. The Fifth Step, though, is a gentler beast whose humour ends with a simple visual gag. Maybe because this is more personally sensitive territory?