The play revolves around the Price family – Fran, the strong, often abrasive, matriarch; Bob, the gentle paterfamilias; Pip, the eldest, a career-woman and mother; Mark, the first-born son, something of a cipher to begin with; Ben, the cheeky youngest boy with his mother wrapped around his little finger; and Rosie, the baby, fresh back from a gap year travelling around Europe.

I think a sense of social consciousness and moral outrage makes A Tale of Two Cities the perfect play to stage in 2016 – a tale in which a bitter class struggle rages; where the fear of one’s own fellow countryman is only surpassed by one’s mistrust of outsiders and unknowns. This is a rich period drama, but the way Dickens writes spans centuries . . . allowing Dickens’s characters and words to speak across the decades to a modern audience.