It’s always a question, isn’t it, as to how well stage adaptations of TV shows can be. I came into Stage/Fright with a tendency towards the benefit of the doubt for Shearsmith and Pemberton - Inside No 9 is the kind of ceaselessly inventive show that implies a lack of being beholden to a singular idea of “what it should be”, the death knell of any attempt at adaptation. Beyond a macabre and slightly tricksy script, the audience in Wyndham’s would have expected very little. The opening scene, with Shearsmith mercilessly killing every annoying member of a theatre audience around him in a set of auditorium seats mirroring ours, was a happy early convincer that I was in good hands. For the rest of the show, there’s a slight over-reliance on fan service in the form of pretty much just staging Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room (a fine episode, but a touch overrated in my humble opinion, or at least the fandom bangs on about it more than they need to), but then sometimes that’s transformative, as in the precursor to A Quiet Night In, with a new guest star each night (for us: Sarah Hadland, barely able to get through it without corpsing). The second half is more cohesive (albeit with another of their oddly prevalent instances of non-consensual touching) and plays nicely with a lot of tropes of film and stage. It feels like there could have been more done with the setting, and maybe it’s just high expectations of two writers who are well-minded to that kind of thing (consider the live episode, or 3x3), but while it wasn’t inherently lacking, there’s the gnaw of not quite living up to potential.