Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.

There’s not much point in having three hours worth of Shakespearean text to craft and the gorgeous Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a canvas if you merely intend to go through the motions, ticking off one of the canon’s less performed works. The question for Jennifer Tang, making her Globe directorial debut, is what to do with this beautifully wrapped gift. The question for us is does it work. 

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 are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. 

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.

Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. 

Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. 

"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.