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.

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.