Tracie Bennett’s sensational performance as Judy Garland, about which I raved in The Oxford Times back in February, is going to be seen by West End audiences from next month until well into the New Year.

Royal & Derngate Northampton’s production of Peter Quilter’s Over the Rainbow, in which Tracie stars as the drug- and booze-raddled singer, opens at Trafalgar Studios (formerly the Whitehall Theatre) on November 16.

There, no doubt, the one-time Coronation Street regular (she played Sharon Gaskell) will earn from the national critics eulogies similar to that already bestowed by me. I wrote of the show: “And so to the very best thing about this revival, the wonderful performance of Tracie Bennett. Wraith thin and looking uncannily like the star, she acts and sings with a passion, power and utter commitment that make one wonder — as Garland wondered at The Talk of the Town — how she will ever complete the run. After previous awards for her work in Hairspray and La Cage aux Folles, she is surely in line for another.”

The transfer of the show, directed by Terry Johnson, is another feather in the cap for a company which earlier this year enjoyed a sell-out run at the National Theatre with its pairing (directed by artistic director Laurie Sansom) of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, and Tennessee Williams’s Spring Storm.

Again, the success of the enterprise was early reported here. Of Spring Storm I commented: “This production is the play’s European premiere. Anyone seeing it will marvel that so fine a work should have remained hidden for so long.”

The Royal & Derngate is the closest theatre (actually a pair of theatres) to Oxford regularly to produce its own plays as distinct from merely hosting performances of those by other companies. Most of this original work is in the Royal, a superb 1884 building by C.J. Phipps — not a “Frank Matcham jewel”, as stated in a recent Guardian newspaper article by David Hare, whose play My Zinc Bed was produced there under Sansom earlier in the year.

Sir David was right in his article about one thing, though: it is notoriously difficult to attract big audiences to the sort of ground-breaking productions for which the theatre is famed. This even applied a few years back when Rupert Goold was making his name — and a very big name — as artistic director. Anyone with respect for the country’s theatrical tradition should lend their support to its work.

The latest production, which I review today on Page 6, is John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. It is highly recommended.

The famously sanguinary play has an actor called Nick Blood in one of the principal roles. In a week in which I also review Murder in the Cathedral, with one Basher Savage as a murderer of Thomas Becket, I think this an amusing coincidence.