In our society, old people are everywhere, but they are everywhere ignored. For while culture loves youth, it often scorns maturity. So the first thing to say is that I really welcome Karim Khan’s Sweetmeats, currently at the Bush Theatre, a kind of serious comedy about South-Asian oldies which explores deep feelings in a calmly compelling way. Khan’s other writing credits include Brown Boys Swim and, for television, All Creatures Great and Small.

William Nicholson’s drama about the short-lived love between the academic and writer CS Lewis and the American poet who initiated a lengthy correspondence with him in the 1950s, Joy Davidman, can be a devastating tearjerker, especially at close quarters such as a cinema or an intimately scaled auditorium. In the boxy vastness of the Aldwych Theatre, once home to the RSC and Tina: The Musical, its strongest points can struggle to be appreciated, however.

In prehistoric Britain, life was full of Hs. It was hard. It was horribly hard. It was hardly happy. And, according to Jack Nicholls, whose debut play has a typically noisy Royal Court title, The Shitheads, it was also hilarious and heartless. Performed in the venue’s upstairs studio space, this tale of life some tens of thousands of years ago is co-directed by David Byrne, the venue’s artistic director, and Aneesha Srinivasan.

Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.

Some 16 or so years ago, I recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from my hotel room in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova.

An infamous international financier, with a contacts book that includes presidents and dictators, a dark dossier on everyone he’ll ever need to bribe or blackmail, and a cold, ruthless heart, spends a long night in downtown New York tryin

MILES., a two-hander with Benjamin (Benji) Akintuyosi as Miles Davis and trumpeter Jay Phelps in a host of roles, including himself – is a show which works remarkably well.

Remarkably, yes. Akintuyosi only made his professional acting debut in this role in a run of the show in Edinburgh last summer. Jay Phelps is above all known as a fine trumpet player and a music producer rather than as an actor. And the subject, Miles Davis – this show is carefully placed just ahead of the centenary of his birth in late May – was a complex and in many ways a disputed figure.

Before the lacerating spats of Albee’s Martha and George, and the circular kvetching of Beckett’s characters, there were August Strindberg’s pioneering excursions into dark psychological truths. Only a handful of his 60 plays are staged here regularly, but thankfully Dance of Death (1900) is one of them.

A right wing populist, a master manipulator of the media, he appears to be immune to the long accepted norms of professional behaviour. Foul-mouthed and a bully, but backed by an oligarch, he rides roughshod over those who play by the old rules, truth, like everything else, merely transactional. “What’s in it for me?” is the only question worth the breath.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before…

"How can we sleep for grief?", asks the brilliant and agitated Thomasina Coverly (the dazzling Isis Hainsworth) during the first act of Arcadia, a question that will come to haunt this magisterial play as it moves towards its simultaneously ravishing, and emotionally ravaging, end. Many of us asked ourselves that very question last November when the author died in the run-up to the Hampstead Theatre opening of Indian Ink, the play of his whose 1995 premiere followed Arcadia by two years.