King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. 

Bloomsday doesn't just celebrate James Joyce's odyssey through so many parts of Dublin that still teem with character; it's also putatively about the same 16 June 1904 when the budding writer first walked out with Nora Barnacle and she put her hand inside his trousers to "make me a man". Do all those folk who swan around in straw hats and frilly dresses know they're marking National Hand Job day too? Have any of them read his deliciously filthy early letters to Nora?

O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them. 

The best playwrights create word magic – and when that happens, you can’t miss it. Other writers produce journalism, or teaching materials. Sadly, for me, Christine Bacon is one of the latter, and her latest 90-minute play, A Fine Idea at the Arcola studio, is a didactic account of 80 years of international aid.

Anybody who relished the blistering family rows of Bad Jews or Admissions might be surprised by what their author, Joshua Harmon, wrote next: a three-hander still based on a warring family, but this time one closely resembling his own.

It’s 1959. Trinidad is fighting for independence from British colonial rule, while the US is beginning to stake its own control over the island, whether through labour exploitation or crime. Some of the locals are finding themselves torn – between a desire to escape, or to have a piece of the action. And it’s driving them towards disaster. 

Kurt Vonnegut’s hallucinatory countercultural classic, Slaughterhouse Five, famously took his experience of being a prisoner of war in Dresden and turned it into a story about a man abducted by aliens whose life jolts backwards and forwards in time. It’s a testament to the So It Goes theatre company that this agile production – performed by four actors – simultaneously captures Vonnegut’s eye-spinningly deadpan humour and the horror that led to this becoming one of the Vietnam era’s great anti-war narratives. 

Okay, theatre is all about acting, but then so is most porn. Except for amateur stuff. Sort of. And then there is AI, deep fakes and digital manipulation, while not forgetting real-world sexual violence and missing children. But even these things can be manipulated by those in power. And by the media. In her debut play, Are You Watching?, staged in the Royal Court’s studio space, Georgie Dettmer explores the relationships between the real and the fake, the watchers and the watched.

War Horse was without a doubt one of the boldest experiments in the National Theatre’s history. As Tom Morris, co-director with Marianne Elliott of the original production says in the programme, “Essentially putting a non-speaking central character on the Olivier stage was going against everything that everyone understood about that space. The design is for epic theatre in which text makes the space come alive. In this show, it’s movement, it’s puppetry.”

About two hours into this big, brash Beetlejuice, the door to Hell opens up, and I felt a sudden desire to rush the stage, dash through and take my chances. Well, perhaps not on press night, when it's poor form to leave before the end.