There’s a lot to be said for a simple story well told and Goodnight Mister Tom is such a one. For a whole generation of British children brought up in the city, the experience of being evacuated during the Second World War was seminal, and for some, life changing . . . David Troughton fills the stage and holds the measure to everything and everyone else. Unsentimental and understated, it is a weighty performance brimming with emotion and meaning.

Rhythms are sometimes dazzling in their intricacy and executed with wit and panache. ‘Instruments’ vary from matchboxes to oil drums: one of my favourites was a little number, performed in the dark using Zippo style lighters which created not only rhythms, but also clever patterns as the lighters lit . . . with such a highly polished and entertaining set of routines the audience can simply marvel at the immaculate conception and execution.

Private Lives does not poke fun at the way the middle classes actually carried on but, tongue-in-cheek and with ironically raised eyebrows mocked the way they might have behaved in the elegant world created by Mr.Coward. Of course times change and what was once risqué – for example unmarried, albeit divorced people, making love on stage – becomes unremarkable. In director, Tom Attenborough’s, production we find, unsurprisingly, no maturity, but a group of adolescents pretending or at least trying hard to be grown-ups.

Having drunk himself to within a few pints of the grave, Hobson is told by his straight talking doctor that his only salvation lies in the hands of a strong-willed woman, and in a scene reminiscent of Lear’s testing of his daughters, he ultimately agrees to Maggie’s terms which include a partnership with her, by now, successful husband – who has been set up in business by Mrs Hepworth.