The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality, from the moral tussle between King Richard and his cousin who will wrest the crown from him and become Henry IV, are, in reality, everywhere underfoot.

Families. Whether it's the House of Atreus, the court at Elsinore or the Archers, they tend to be of compelling interest. For most of us, loyalties, guilty secrets, truths that will out, petty jealousies and sentimentality tend to be the order of the day more often than towering passion and murder. And that is what Andrew Keatley focuses on in this gentle, poignant, often funny play about a family reunion in the run-up to the "things can only get better" election in 1997.

Burt Bacharach, existentialist? That's among the surprising thoughts prompted by the searchingly titled What's It All About?, the altogether delightful but also touching musical revue that trawls Bacharach's back catalogue – and that on opening night found the 87-year-old tunesmith tinkling the ivories for a moment or two during the curtain call.

We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it’s easy to forget a time when plays were introduced, interrupted and even accompanied by a pit orchestra playing music specially composed by the greatest composers of the day. We now hear this music as concert overtures and suites: Egmont, Peer Gynt, L’Arlésienne, and the like.

Life, the universe and everything… in 70 minutes. You certainly can’t fault Nick Payne’s ambition, nor help but admire the dazzling inventiveness of his theoretical physics romcom with a side helping of artisanal beekeeping.

A Richard Bean play is always to be welcomed – he wrote England People Very Nice and One Man, Two Guvnors, two of the most enjoyably rambunctious comedies of recent years – but also with a note of caution. Sometimes, as with The Big Fellah, there's more style than substance (or more jokes than narrative) and that's the case with his 2002 play The Mentalists, being given a West End revival with a huge comedy star making his stage debut.

There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s new drama Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there’s a bright decked area in which the seemingly sunny lives of its characters play out – the setting is the peaceful French countryside, 1921. Around the stage edges, however, is a very different environment, a dark space of silent, agonising memories.

Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.

In the age of austerity, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid cliché. Especially well-meaning cliché. For example, all cuts to welfare are bad; we must defend government support of the needy at all costs. But clichéd ideas rarely make good drama so when I first heard about Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play, whose theme is the cuts in the legal aid budget, I must confess that my spirits dropped. Was this going to be another case of theatrical journalism?

The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig as its cast – she avoided the obvious option of writing about how bad the idea of cloning is, and instead opted to explore its individual consequences. By doing so she came up with an unforgettable image of humanity in all its pain and anger.