The last work of writer and journalist Joseph Roth before he died of alcoholism, The Legend is a painful yet magical autobiographical imagining from this eloquent liberal Jewish writer cast adrift in the late 1930s . . .

I’m always encouraged and delighted when a writer finds some fresh way of getting their ideas across, some novel way to use the empty space and offer the patient audience a new key to somebody else’s world. Alys Metcalf’s new offering is a stride in the right direction . . . The scene is a small riverside jetty where Jo, a writer and recovering cancer patient, is trying to teach herself to fish . . .

Like a newly anointed politician smartened up for public consumption the show has had a makeover since its first iteration at the Wardrobe Theatre, prior to an outing at Edinburgh. Some glitzy shoes and smart designer bag-dresses have allowed the show entrance into polite society. The concept does the rest: what starts as a kind of musical/theatrical joke soon becomes hypnotic. Like any worthy art it creates its own world the exploration of which gives us new insight into our own.

Amidst all the national hand-wringing over the fate of those forlorn, native North Africans and Middle-Easterners fleeing the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by bloody tyrants and religious fanatics, it is far too easy to overlook the individual tragedies and lifelong psychological scarring accompanying such events, that in truth, only a comfortable armchair can ignore.