Clementine Scott

Twenty or so dancers parade before an oversized Art Deco clock, to the familiar strains of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from a brass band offstage. In other words, the stage is set for a reassuringly old-fashioned taste of the Golden Age of movie musicals.

Indian Ink is not among Tom Stoppard’s greatest plays. The tale of a literary darling moving to 1930s India is awkwardly structured and hamfisted in its messages about Indian identity. Yet this revival breathes new life into the lesser-known work.

An ominous small town tension, the lingering fear that something rotten lies beneath the wholesome community spirit, pervades KENREX, which transfers to London after an acclaimed Sheffield Theatres run.

We’re in a room straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest, two couples sipping Scotch on mid-century chaise longues. Like most plays set entirely in someone’s living room, though, fault lines amidst the middle-class domestic bliss soon emerge.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula can actually be quite funny. There’s the cowboy who’s inexplicably present in 19th-century Yorkshire, and how Jonathan Harker sees nothing wrong with doing routine real estate transactions at a remote Transylvanian castle. Unfortunately, Dracapella has channelled precisely none of this.

In an age of transphobic fearmongering about any drag queen daring to perform in front of children, acknowledging the fact that British family entertainment has always been queer feels more important than ever. He’s Behind You takes this one step further, extending the concept of queer adult panto to its full, glorious potential.

The Christmas Thing is a variety show with a little too much variety, and sometimes feels like a showcase for its talented performers (and perhaps a few game audience members) rather than a standalone show.

This is a tale exhilaratingly told, and if it fails it fails for being too inventive, rather than not inventive enough.

This David Copperfield is far more than a cheap facsimile of its source material. There is room here for all the observational humour of Dickens’ writing, but also for all the pains and lessons of growing up.

Few Shakespeare plays have received the ‘updated for the current political moment’ treatment more than Julius Caesar. In Petty Men, though, our Roman dictator-for-life is not a Trumpian autocrat, but a BAFTA-winning actor.

If you’ve ever worked a remote job, and been strapped for cash, you’ll recognise the temptation to take on additional casual work on the side. Isley Lynn and Libby Rodliffe take this concept to its extreme in their one-woman show, Jobsworth.

Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware.

What do we do when the world is falling apart around us? We sing. Cloying though that sentiment may be, in the hands of the team of five devisers behind Precipice, it’s anything but.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more striking opening outfit in a play than #FATKARY: The Corrido of a Tragic Ex-Fat Woman. Performer and writer Caridad Gómez dons a fat suit exaggerated to comical absurdity, her face mostly covered in the manner of a lucha libre fighter and her body obscured by what looks like layers upon layers of Cath Kidston cushions. Clad in something so cartoonish, Gómez encourages us to see her not quite as a real person, but as a caricature or a bogeyman, who can’t quite connect with her audience directly.

There’s something of Heartstopper to the design of Barrier(s), pastel sketches of suburban living rooms and nervous texts to a crush etched out lovingly on the projector. On this occasion, though, those charmingly awkward texts have a practical function as well as an aesthetic one, because Barrier(s) is performed mostly in British Sign Language.

Romeo a Juliet does not make any of its political points overtly, and this is an occasion where some things are better left unsaid, without cheap gimmicks. With nothing made explicit, the audience comes away reflecting on their own use of language and dialect in their daily life, as well as on how over 500 years later, new eyes on Shakespeare can still make desperately overdone texts feel brand new.

In Sheffield, the self-proclaimed “lesbian capital of the North”, a revolution is coming. The freedom fighters in question are a group of lesbian mechanics, loosely based on the real life Gwenda’s Garage, a lesbian-owned garage named after pioneering racing driver Gwenda Stewart that became a hub for 1980s feminist activism.