Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?

Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.

As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of the depravity of the camps, it is important that the warning from history is regularly proclaimed anew – and heeded.

“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled.

Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom.

The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind.

The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He not only acted like a fizzing firecracker. He wrote books about his most celebrated roles, and several novels set in his native South Africa. He also wrote plays, and he painted. It was as if the stage could not contain him.

As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.

Solo plays and performances are, of necessity, the theatrical currency of the moment, whether across an entire season at the Bridge Theatre or last week at the Old Vic in the too briefly glimpsed Three Kings, starring a rarely-better Andrew Scott.

Ah, 2015. Those halcyon days of packed theatres. Thank God the RSC had the presence of mind to film Polly Findlay’s production of The Merchant of Venice, now streaming on BBC iPlayer.