This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and greeted with joyful groans. To say it’s no epic is a compliment: Charles Court Opera’s boutique pantos rely upon perfect focus in small spaces, and this is a tight little craft, with five brilliant women firing up director/writer John Savournin’s script and David Eaton’s musical arrangements.

Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. 

The National Theatre these days seems to be going from hit-to-hit, with transfers aplenty and full houses at home. And there's every reason to expect that this fizzy adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1983 creep-out, The Witches, has the West End and further in its sights.

In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,

"So life was never better than 

In nineteen sixty-three 

(Though just too late for me) – 

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban 

And the Beatles' first LP."

Henrik Ibsen may well have wanted to shake things up, to rile against the social mores of his time. But his visionary critiques didn’t usually come with anything as radical as, say, optimism. And there’s no more of a downer than Ghosts.

Oliver Goldsmith was a literary all-rounder – novelist, poet and playwright – remembered chiefly for one example of each discipline, respectively The Vicar of Wakefield, "The Deserted Village" and, of course, above all, She Stoops to Conquer.

“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but none about the spectacle, even more impressive (as we subsequently agreed) than the big Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas that cost a helluva lot more for a seat in Vegas.

“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is getting on far too well with her boyfriend Matt (Jack Flammiger). And to top it off, mum Ruth (Catherine Cusack) has found everything but the most important item on Rachel’s meticulous shopping list: the matches.

The Comedian runs, bounces even, onto the stage. The audience immediately applauds. He seizes the mic and makes self-deprecatory gestures. Then he rubs the mic stand suggestively. We laugh. When he turns around we can see a laughing mouth printed on the back of his shirt. It’s Samuel Barnett – former history boy and star of stage and screen – and the audience instantly warms to him. He’s that kind of guy.

Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there anything new to be said about William Shakespeare?

Well, the fact that there is nothing old to be said about him (very little is known about the life of the glover’s son from Stratford) means that there’s always something new, as the evidence to gainsay any claim is minimal. Tedious conspiracy theories aside, it’s the kind of paradox the man himself might have appreciated.