There are critics who measure all performances of the great roles against some supposed ideal; Holness ought to be such and such, Othello ought to be so and, this Macbeth didn’t have that quality, Portia should have done it like this and so on. How tiresome! Would the world be better off if Shakespeare had left detailed notes on how his plays should be played and staged? Of course not. Give us a different Shylock, make us look again at Prince Hal. That’s not to say anything goes . . .

Ayckbourn has become the biographer of the sexual peccadilloes and day-to-day emotional strain of middle England; it’s quirks and storms-in-teacups. In this collection of five short one-act plays, having tucked a string of successes under his belt he seems to be flexing his newly found dramatic muscles in a kind of, ‘Look what I can do’, display. In Mother Figure, a housebound mum, whose husband is permanently on the road and so has no one but the kids to talk to, has her brain reduced to milk-soaked wads.

Mark Bruce’s vision of this cultural foundation stone is dark, violent and sexy. The story of Odysseus’s return from Troy starts with his leave-taking from Penelope and their newborn son, Telemachus (Wayne Parsons) who we meet again, twenty years later, as an adult. Mr.Bruce has developed a style that incorporates dance and a kind of dumb show. But here is no series of melodramatic tableaux; rather flights of gymnastic abandon and vigorous purpose . . .