"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

Katie Mitchell’s desire to bust the boundaries of theatre has taken a brilliant turn. Over her long and distinguished career as a director she has been tirelessly inventive, injecting stylised movement into Greek tragedy, projecting film onto giant screens of the actors onstage, slicing a set into three time zones.

This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.

“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).

This weighty box set contains all 52 episodes of the BBC’s take on George Simenon's Maigret, four seasons of which were made and broadcast between 1960 and 1963. Given how much vintage BBC material has been wiped, that this series can now be watched on Blu-ray is little short of miraculous.

Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance.

Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations.

If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it may appeal to descend into the pleasantly air-conditioned surroundings of Jermyn Street Theatre and take a trip to 1888.

There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny.

They all laughed when the streaming service Britbox declared that it wanted to become a sort of UK-orientated Netflix, because so far it’s been mostly a back catalogue operation which plunders the BBC and ITV archives. You really want to pay a subscription to watch Are You Being Served? and Rosemary and Thyme?