There’s nothing quite like magic, live, up close and personal. Sure there are the TV spectaculars, the casino resort mega-shows and even The Masked Magician to pull back the curtains, but there’s a frisson in the air when the card that’s in your head appears in the conjuror’s hand. Roll in a spot of cabaret and circus and the tang of transgression tingles on the tongue, the grim world of the natural sliding away, the supernatural its welcome substitute. 

For sheer extremes of family dysfunction Theresa Rebeck’s Mad House must be aiming to set new records in American drama. The latest in a line that stretches back to Eugene O’Neill, the plentiful other contenders that have appeared over the decades mean that it’s become a crowded field but, on the cantankerous patriarch front at least, Bill Pullman’s performance as Daniel, Rebeck’s cussed paterfamilias, trumps most of its predecessors for sheer malevolence.

The stage is cluttered with objects; a pianola sits stage left; a large cabinet, soon to be revealed as a display case for tiny glass ornaments, dominates the centre. A man, gaunt, in his 40s perhaps, wanders among this stuff.

Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is the Word" after a brief prologue.

A lot has happened to British-Canadian comic Katherine Ryan since she last toured and was expecting to go back on the road in 2020 – the “pandem”, which affected us all, of course, plus unexpected marriage and second-time motherhood. Updating us on that, plus her thoughts on much more, is a lot to pack in but she does so at pace in a show that barely stops for breath.

Catherine Bohart had a more eventful lockdown than most, as it marked the end of a five-year relationship and what she describes as a sort of breakdown followed. To add insult to injury, the break-up came not along after she and her girlfriend, fellow comic Sarah Keyworth (whom she doesn't name in the hour), had launched You'll Do, a podcast about – you've guessed – love and relationships.

Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.

One of the many theatrical casualties of Omicron in December was the official UK opening of Moulin Rouge!, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s indelible 2001 film that has already racked up 10 Tony Awards for its 2019 Broadway production (albeit in a depleted season).

There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show after show, venue after venue, ceased performance or curtailed operations, however temporarily.

When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new love into a dazzling idiosyncratic narrative about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives 227 days at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.