Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO musical, the infinitely superior Sweeney Todd? Yes, to varying degrees. But the real saviour here was the ENO Orchestra, fresh from its triumph alongside its inseparable chorus at the Olivier Awards and now on hand to make a silk purse, or rather a gold cigarette-holder, out of a patchy but always superbly orchestrated score.

Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves – first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough – was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ayckbourn tropes – warring couples and interconnecting sets – and concerns infidelity and the lies that couples tell each other (and themselves) to keep marriages alive.

Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her most important play, although it remained unfinished at her death in 1965, aged only 34; it was assembled from drafts by her ex-husband and executor Robert Nemiroff, finally reaching Broadway in 1970.   

Lesley Manville’s performance as Mary, the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O’Neill’s dark masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by Richard Eyre, is breathtaking, from the moment she first steps on stage until her last sombre soliloquy.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. But although his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bells Tolls, is familiar as a classic account of the Spanish Civil War, his play – which is set in Madrid at the height of the conflict – is, to put it mildly, less well known.

Based on real people and real events, The Fifth Column is now revived for the first time in London by Two’s Company. But is this story of espionage and betrayal, which is Hemingway’s sole excursion into playwriting, anything more than a curiosity?

My skin is still tingling with the presence of imaginary critters. Never mind I’m A Celebrity… or Bear Grylls’s latest expedition – Tracy Letts has got them beat when it comes to nightmarish creepy-crawlies. But it’s not just a creature feature: this starry 20^th anniversary revival at London’s newest pop-up theatre offers an eerie mirror to contemporary paranoia.

Poor Alice. She’s alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben – a doctor – is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to have just suffered some kind of catastrophic loss. Ben seems to be working too much, so the couple never see each other. I say “seems” because it is very soon apparent that things are really not what they seem in Québecoise actress and playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s brilliant 2008 play about one woman’s sense of self, and her conflicting emotions about motherhood. Oh, poor Alice.

"Thomas Aikenhead – who the fuck are you?" So goes the refrain to the opening number of I Am Thomas, a boisterous co-production between London’s Told by an Idiot, and the National Theatre of Scotland and Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre north of the border. It’s a good question, one that acknowledges few in the audience will be familiar with the show’s central figure. And also one that raises the issue of why we should even care about some guy we’ve never heard of.

Sequel-itis has spread to the stage. There’s no caped crusader, but the troubled quartet of Neil LaBute’s latest will be familiar to anyone who caught Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeida in 2011 – as will Soutra Gilmour’s industrial crate set. We even begin the same way: in the middle of a foul-mouthed shouting match between relentlessly combative Steph and sometime-paramour Greg. But nostalgia value aside, this melancholic reprise is generally a case of diminishing returns.

This is set in “a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk”, a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says, and the initial signs certainly point to that. The aisle of the glorious Grade I-listed French Protestant Church in Soho Square – one of the few remnants of England's rich Huguenot history – is covered with a vivid blue plastic sheet running most of its length, as if in a fashion show runway, and the cast, some dressed to the nines, make their entrance in a sort of dumbshow with heightened dance steps and arm movements.