Back in June 2017, in the days when English summertime was a lazy idyll rather than an apocalyptic inferno, RSC artistic director Greg Doran met us at his office in Stratford-upon-Avon and asked whether we wanted to write a new version of Molière’s Tartuffe. For a couple of hack TV sitcom writers, Stratford was a culture shock.

It’s night, and the woman (Leanne Best) is waiting for a phone call. She’s desperate for the voice of her lover – or rather ex-lover: they split three nights ago. Both have secrets they will disclose over the course of their final conversation. Both have positions to defend. The scene is set for a coupling of melodrama and banality. In Daniel Raggett’s version of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, everything is somehow generic – grief included.

Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing.

Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre.

A sizeable Off West End success nearly eight years ago looks more than a little exposed in a new, scaled-up production that is one of several shows on now, or imminently, to feature a Game of Thrones actor in a leading role.

I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. 

Blackout. Dark, the colour of childhood fear. Black, the colour of despair. Black. No light visible; no colours to see. Just pitch black, maybe even bible black. This is how Robert Alan Evans’s The Woods, which stars the brilliant Lesley Sharp and which opened tonight in the Royal Court’s theatre upstairs, begins – in total darkness. Followed by images of desolation, the sound of torrential rain, the devastation of a falling tree. In the crepuscular gloom, the story begins to unfold.

Sir Peter Hall had no ordinary life, as might be expected from the director who more than any other defined the British theatre of the last half of the 20th century. The same can be said of the unforgettable two-part send-off he received exactly a year on from his death in 2017, age 86.

Fenella Fielding - “one of the finest female impersonators in the business,” joked Eric Morecambe – has died at the age of 90. Most actors of such a great vintage tend to be forgotten, but not Fielding. Last year she celebrated her big birthday with a memoir.

Holy shit! After being closed for two long years, the old and battered Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn has been refurbished and relaunched, with a name change and £5.5 million-worth of improvements. It’s now a much more welcoming place, full of light at the front and with an on-street café, as well as easy access to the new plush seats and excellent sightlines.