The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then, takes its time, and leading lady Tamsin Greig often speaks in a stage whisper requiring you to lean into the words. (This is that rare production that, praise be, is unamplified.) 

Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmings (Kevin Kelly's Turning the Screw), followed by Ben and Imogen Holst according to Mark Ravenhill. That RSC Swan production is now playing in the Richmond round. It grips, thanks to extraordinary performances by Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates, and taut dramatic structure, but how deeply is it rooted in truth, and does that matter?

Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in Hanover. Not only did Sternath get the obvious stunner of two Prokofiev sonatas in the first half; he also had all the best tunes and phrases as the right-hand man, so to speak, in Shostakovich’s piano arrangement of his towering Tenth Symphony. The best, as in absolutely no holds barred, came at the very end.

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.

As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.

There’s nothing like an anodyne new(ish) work to give a masterpiece an even higher profile. Rachel Portman‘s Tipping Points, promising to address climate change issues, was so bland and featureless it could have been composed by AI. Any one bar of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, on the other hand, shows originality of throught within a tradition, and unlike the Portman near-vacuum it challenged the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland to the limits.

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.

At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is known if we first meet the Governess in an insane asylum bed? Yet whether she was mad or maddened during the course of terrifying events 30 years earlier remains crucially unclear. Between them director/designer Isabella Bywater, soprano Ailish Tynan and conductor Duncan Ward deliver all the frissons in Britten’s concentrated masterpiece.

It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). 

If audience reaction is anything to go by, Kahchun Wong’s season-opening first concert officially in post as principal conductor of the Hallé was an outstanding success.

And the reception was deserved. Still young enough, with a mop of hair cascading over his forehead, to look like a Wunderkind, he has considerable experience behind him, with a career on both sides of the world – in south-east Asia and in Europe and America.