It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.

Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a serious film about nuclear war based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, he decided to turn it into a comedy with the help of porn-obsessed satirist Terry Southern.

RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.

The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! 

Delirium has greeted Disney’s eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals (part of her Rutshire Chronicles series).

A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.

This new film exists first as a failed franchise equation, adding Conjuring Universe producer James Wan to IT screenwriter Gary Dauberman as writer-director (he also wrote The Conjuring’s Annabelle series), but suffering heavy cuts prior to this much delayed release.

Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can seem like hapless histrionics and just a bit daft. 

It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely for Gallic-Gang Productions to resurrect Jean (La Cage aux Folles) Poiret’s farce Fefe de Broadway, adapted as French Toast.

Set in Yorkshire in the 1890s, and based on the novels by CL Skelton, The Hardacres is the story of the titular family who, it seems, were pioneers of takeaway fish, although not accompanied by chips. It’s their stall selling fried herring fresh from the ocean which makes the Hardacres an unexpected fortune.

In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed with quirky detail, much of it surely never intended to go anywhere but over the heads of its original child readers.