Steam engines, injuries and a train called Brexit: The mad story of Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express

In 1974, Andrew Lloyd Webber began working on songs for an animated TV series based on the Thomas the Tank Engine children’s books. It didn’t pan out, but the idea of singing, anthropomorphic trains would lay the foundations – or should that be the railway tracks? – for the 1984 debut of Starlight Express, the bonkers musical extravaganza in which actors don roller skates to whizz past the audience in a theatre refitted with a race track. Decked out in Eighties-meets-steampunk outfits, they play all-singing, all-dancing trains competing to be crowned the fastest engine in the world.

It’s enough to make its predecessor  look sensible and understated.  has certainly been the butt of many jokes about the fever dream excesses of is making an extravagant return to London, pulling into the Wembley Park Theatre and transforming this cavernous former television studio with ramps, runways and pyrotechnics.