A single sofa is all we have on stage to attract our eye - the signifier of intimate family evenings, chummy breakfast TV and, more recently, Graham Norton’s bonhomie. Until you catch proper sight of the room’s walls that is, which are not, as you first thought, Duluxed in a bland magnolia shade, nor even panelled with upmarket modernist abstract paintings, befitting of the whiff of wealth that suffuses the space. It’s a man’s head, repeating and repeating and repeating, turned away, bull-necked, present but not present, intimidating from beyond the grave.

It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped away at gunpoint, And… make it into a musical? 

Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen.

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. 

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.

Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s superb adaptation is that it projects this idea through, fittingly, one of the most truly collective performances London has seen in years. 

Your response to Barney Norris’s one-man play, based on David Foenkinos’s bestselling novel as translated by Megan Jones, probably depends on which of the Gens is yours. 

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.

If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical“, you say? Okay, but who’s going to do the score, who’s going to dare to follow in the footsteps of Lenny and Steve, of Cole, of Elton (okay that one came a bit later)? “Duke Ellington!” Right. You’ve sold it.