The provocation and confrontation inherent in queer (re)imaginings of familiar material is utilised well throughout Ham & Passion. The audience are encouraged to at least acknowledge, if not always overturn their own expectations, and challenged to try to apply a personal logic to the proceedings and their semiotics. What is primal? What is sex? How might masculinity be a performance?

Director Erica Whyman has magic-ed Shakespeare’s Dream into a fast, furious and imaginative fun fiesta. And to judge from this Stratford performance it will radiate national delight as it tours from March, supported by fourteen am-dram companies and armies of children turned into fairies . . . ‘The Dream’ is the play which wins many a young person to Shakespeare and this production, especially if its poetic depth grows in performance, should bring many to the fold.

Of Mice and Men tells the story of George and Lennie, a pair of roving hired hands – bindle stiffs – as they arrive in a desolate farm in the middle of the Depression. George, the keen young go-getter, Lennie the cross he has to bear. But they have a dream, a dream of buying their own patch of dirt and, as Lennie’s mantra repeats, living off the fat of the land. Lennie is a couple of stalks short of a cornfield and his gentle giant status is constantly tested.