Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls.

Mischief Theatre is a wonder of modern commercial theatre. In 2008, a group of young actors who had met at drama school started the ensemble – writing, producing, directing and performing their own work.

Who knew? This West End premiere of the 2007 Broadway entry from the legendary songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) secured a prime holiday-season slot at the last minute when this playhouse's previous entry, The Man in the White Suit, closed prematurely.

The prolific Mike Bartlett – from whose pen have leapt television series such as Doctor Foster and Press, as well as stage hits such as King Charles III – has two things to celebrate tonight. On ITV his new three-part psychological drama, Sticks and Stones, begins, and this is also the opening night of his new play at the Kiln.

History has corseted Elizabeth I with the title of “Virgin Queen” for centuries, but in Ella Hickson’s laceratingly witty new play she is revealed as nothing less than a lioness on a hot tin roof. In this pacy, dagger-sharp production we watch Elizabeth asses the dangers and contradictions of her inheritance, before ruthlessly reinventing herself so that she will not fall victim to the court’s deadly political undercurrents.   

If good intentions were everything, Teenage Dick would be the play of the year. As it is, this British premiere at the Donmar of an Off Broadway entry from summer 2018 grants centre-stage, and not before time, to two disabled actors, one of whom – the mesmerically fearless Daniel Monks – plays the Shakespeare-inspired figure of the title.

The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like other playwrights from similar backgrounds, she has tended to be pigeonholed in the category of "Asian playwright", and expected to write about clichéd subjects such as arranged marriage or religion.

This scary, electrically beautiful adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book about living on the faultline between imagination and reality is a fantastically alternative offering for the festive season. While the parameters of the story are dark, it’s an edgy, stunningly thought through tribute to the wild and wonderful life of the mind, and its ability to help us engage with the horrors that life flings at us.  

When Qdos brought back pantomime to the Palladium three years ago after an absence of nearly 30 years, it set the bar high with superb production values, a large ensemble, a live band – and a stage stuffed with stars. 

Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation.