For sheer celebrity firepower, the stand-out seasonal show is The Boy in the Dress, which has songs by Robbie Williams, who has sold 80 million records, and is based on a book by David Walliams, whose sales of his children’s books have reached 100 million. It can’t have taken the Royal Shakespeare Company, which premieres the show at Stratford-on-Avon (until 8 March), long to do the maths of the potentially interested audience.

In readership and cheeky comic style, Walliams is the heir to Roald Dahl (a connection cemented by Quentin Blake illustrating the books of both), and the RSC would clearly like The Boy in the Dress to be a successor, in impact and income, to its long-running song-and-dance version of Dahl’s Matilda.

Published in 2008, Walliams’ first novel does what it says on the jacket: the hero, 12-year-old Dennis, comes to school in a dress, designed by beautiful classmate Lisa James, with whom he shares a fascination for women’s fashion, schooled by their joint reading of Vogue magazine. When scorn for his new wardrobe threatens Dennis’s stardom as free-scoring striker for the junior football team, he and Lisa fight to achieve for him both collective respect and individual identity.