We’ve come to learn what socially distanced means but, 72 years ago, the distance that concerned Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers was that between racial groups in the United States. With a catalogue of hits behind them, they turned to South Pacific, and fashioned a velvet glove comprising some of musical theatre’s greatest songs into which they packed an iron fist of a condemnation of prejudice – popular entertainment with an uncompromising message.

Last Easter has become a lot more relatable since it was forced to postpone this run at the Orange Tree Theatre, originally scheduled for 2020.

Much has been made of the raison d’etre for this King Lear as the slowly gestated, Covid-delayed brainchild of the director Keith Warner, assembling a company of acting singers who have made their names on the opera stage.

Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter in 1957 (although it wasn't seen in London until 1960) the year before The Birthday Party received its notorious première at the Lyric Hammersmith. When a friend described them both as political plays, about power and victimisation, the playwright readily agreed. And it is this aspect of the 50-minute, one-act piece that director Jeremy Herrin foregrounds.

A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then).

If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who conjured Pippin while still at Carnegie Mellon University.