It sounds like an evening in hell, but the German musical version of Rocky seems to have gone down very well with the critics in Hamburg. Sylvester Stallone turned up for the premiere of the show – co-produced by Ukrainian boxers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko – and made all the right semi-intelligible noises.

“I really truly believe that this thing here is going to be extraordinarily successful. I don’t know how it can fail because it’s about the people,” he drawled.