Creatively exceptional at every level with Terry Davies’s music cleverly interpolated with recorded classics, Lex Brotherston’s fluid set design and costumes, Paule Constable’s atmospheric lighting and ensemble work at its finest.

Dance theatre at its most superlative from the now-touring revival of Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell, a wonderfully conceived and detailed tale of humanity inspired by the 1930s novels of Patrick Hamilton (cont).

Tom Lehrer, supreme among the one-offs.

Hats off to Clive Carter and Sally Ann Triplett as Horace and Madge with James Clyde as the butler and Alex Gibson-Giorgio’s hyper Italian designer landing the laughs from a mistaken identity plot fed with corn.

Tap dance ace Attmore, the thrillingly-voiced St Louis and an outstanding ensemble sing, hoof and glide their way through the big numbers, deliciously costumed by Yvonne Milnes and Peter McKintosh on McIntosh’s art deco sets (cont).

Top Hat may not come out of musical aficionados’s top drawer but in the hands of director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall, Broadway star Phillip Attmore and Lucy St Louis it delivers plenty to delight in high style (cont).

Brilliant though Pike is (with good work too from Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot and much credit to director Justin Marti), polemic keeps pushing through the surface as the part-flashbacked family relationships are explored.

Not the same heft here though to a three-hander about a feminist High Court judge who finds what she knows from the bench shatteringly mirrored in the life she balances as wife, mother and karaoke fan (cont).

Virtuosic return to the stage by Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia, Suzie Miller’s legally-themed follow-up to Prima Facie which garnered top awards for her and for Josie Comer’s solo performance (cont).

Bertie Carvel powerfully conveys the mind disturbance of Leontes and Madeline Appiah the bemused pain and ultimate serenity of Hermione, with Aicha Kossoko a riveting Paulina. Praise too for Max Perryment’s music and Imogen Knight’s music.

There’s a dream-like yet often bitingly raw quality to the staging which sees Bohemia veered from the bucolic to the elemental and the superb Trevor Fox’s doubling of Autolycus and Time extended to a continuing narrative presence (cont).

With striking visual imagery and textual innovation director Yael Farber (with designer Soutra Gilmour and dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg) sets her stamp on the emotional and physical swerves of The Winter’s Tale (cont).

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Director Daniel Raggett does well to keep the strands together and there’s top-notch work from Shelley Conn and Thusitha Jayasundera as the sisters, Humphrey Ker as the whip, Dinita Ghohil as the MP’s wife, and Helena Wilson and Fode Simbo as his staff.

Adeel Akhtar terrific as a married to money British Asian MP who grabs a party leadership chance only to be potentially thwarted by his sisters’ exclusion from their father’s will (cont).

Shaan Sahota’s The Estate isn’t the first debut play to squeeze a quart of plot nto a pint pot but the dialogue really zings in her blending of political and domestic drama (cont).

Lots to like in the acting with a strikingly strong stage debut from Arsema Thomas, well foiled by Freddy Carter, and a sparkily funny turn from Anushka Chakravarti as Clare’s sister.

Much wit in the writing even if the moralising does get heavy-handed and I did wonder why director Blanche McIntye hadn’t dropped the Stateside accents when the present day vernacular would have worked just as well without it (cont).

Chiara Atik’s play Poor Clare, a parable on poverty and social division around the life-changing meeting of the privilege-renouncing and yet to be canonised Clare and Francis of Assisi, comes garlanded with an American awards (cont).

Some spirited performances, notably Adam Wadsworth’s doubling of Caius and Slender, Jolyon Coy’s Ford, Sophie Russell’s Quickly and Samuel Creasey’s Evans.