In the programme, Richard Bean says “I’m interested in entertaining an audience rather than changing the world or becoming an auteur”, and he certainly does entertain the audience. Full of sweary banter and genuinely funny jokes, you come out of it feeling like you’ve heard some fun stories down the pub. I didn’t feel I had learned a moral message on leaving the play, but I don’t think Bean wanted to do that. He just wanted to display the much more complicated story of how men’s minds work, and how people find meaning in their life . . .

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 . . .

The play takes place in Blackwell’s wonderful Norrington Room . . . it’s a lovely space to enjoy a play, surrounded by such a wealth of knowledge and literature. Creation Theatre channels the bookish vibe by using books as some of their very minimal props and to create clever sound effects. The costume design is outstanding, taking the drama outside of a particular time or place and allowing the personal aspect of Shakespeare’s play to take precedence over a more political setting.

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.