It's one of those true stories you couldn't make up: in 1920s Kentucky, Floyd Collins, visionary cave explorer, happens across the spectacular sand cave of his dreams only to become trapped on the way back to the surface.

Restoration theatre has the reputation of being a rake’s paradise – all those randy young aristos in hot pursuit of buxom wenches. But even in the depths of 17th-century playwriting, there was room for repentance and regret among the discarded petticoats and ripped bodices. So it is with Stephen Jeffreys’s The Libertine, his now sharply rewritten 1994 play that was also made into a film starring Johnny Depp.

What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal, and the daughter certainly dominates in a way that her regal father doesn't. So Cymbeline Renamed, as half the subheading of Matthew Dunster's bold production puts it, is fine.

At its best, theatre is great at putting resonant metaphors on stage. And, as Elinor Cook’s new play abundantly proves, the activity of mountain climbing seems very promising as a metaphor for masculine endeavor. All that effort, all that heaving, all that straining. Blood and sweat and sometimes tears. And then the question: why do men want to stand on top of the world? And is it just men who have this urgent need for power and dominion?

Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and addiction on the New York publishing scene. It has already played in translation in Mexico and in France, where it won Molière awards for direction and design. Its director, the prolific screen and stage actor John Malkovich, now brings it to London for the first time – and obligingly lends his famously dark-chocolate tones to the reminder to turn off mobile phones.

Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First World War, when 41 men associated with the east London team – players, backroom staff and supporters – joined up en masse to fight the Kaiser. Three never returned and several others were seriously injured.

We are lost in the wood. In the limbo state between dream and reality, memory and present, youth and age, companionship and seclusion, life and death, struggle and success, fame and obscurity. Pinter often visits that place of in between, but the elusive and haunting No Man’s Land – electrifyingly presented by two of our greatest thespians – dwells deep within it.

Growing up is a kind of grief: losing the person you once were to embrace the person you will become. That loss can fracture familial relationships, forced to adjust and reform as offspring alter, challenge, question and move away – physically, emotionally or both.

The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17^th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.

The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.