Surrogacy is an emotionally fraught subject. The arrangement by which one woman gives birth to another’s baby challenges traditional notions of motherhood, and pitches the anguish of the woman who can’t have children herself against the agony of another woman who gives up her child.

How well do you know your British history? Fancy explaining the causes and origins of the Glorious Revolution or listing the members of the Grand Alliance? What about the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement or the Occasional Confirmity Bill of 1702? I ask not because Helen Edmundson’s Queen Anne will require you to know any of this, but rather precisely because it won’t.

Can The Tempest open on stage without a tempest – of crashing, shrieking and torment – and thus without what can become five minutes-plus of inaudibility? In Gregory Doran’s 2016 Stratford production for the RSC, revived at the Barbican Theatre, the answer is, as so often, no. Joe Shire, Darren Raymond and Caleb Frederick, playing mariners, have lines to deliver but against giant-wave effects and the supersonic demolition of a ship, they might as well stay mute.

German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s light-touch 90-minute comedy is a chic satire on the slippery business of making art – and especially on the difficulty of assessing it. Whose judgement matters, after all?

When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.

A memorable 2015 parliamentary select committee hearing asked Kids Company CEO Camila Batmanghelidjh and chair of trustees Alan Yentob whether the organisation was ever fit for purpose.

What do you call a woman who murdered Dirty Den, is the darling of TV comedy producers, writes radio plays about the golden age of Hollywood, hosted and judged Channel 4’s Jewish Mum of the Year, was until just a few weeks ago tap dancing through eight shows a week in Stepping Out in the West End and was runner-up on Celebrity Mastermind with her specialist subject:

An enormous amount rides on a musical's opening number. Without explicitly expressing it, a good opener sets tone, mood and style. Take The Lion King, where "Circle of Life" so thrillingly unites music, design and direction that nothing that follows equals it. "Spring", the opener of The Wind in the Willows, repeatedly announces the warmth of the season, and precious little else. Animals dance perkily, but with nothing to dance about, the flatly staged song goes nowhere.

Labels have their uses but they can also be a blight. The works of the Scottish playwright James Bridie – with their regional accents and domestic settings – bear many of the hallmarks of so-called Kitchen Sink drama but didn’t make the canon. Not grimy enough, perhaps, not English enough, and certainly not angry enough.

Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid.