The competition for best dramatic use of a coffee table is won hands down by the wagon-wheel one that prompts a major argument in When Harry Met Sally. Runner-up is the one that appears in Detroit. So deliciously hideous that it gets its own laugh, the symbolic table from Ben and Mary’s nice suburban home is given to new neighbours Sharon and Kenny whose total lack of furniture stems from the fact that they only recently met during a spell in major substance-abuse rehab.

There was always going to be one Borat moment in this festival. And it came courtesy of the Albanians, who, for comic effect, in the middle of their Henry VI, Part 2 indulged in the gratuitous harassment of a mentally handicapped person. It got the biggest laugh of the show from the expats, suggesting it's still quite a rib-tickler, disabled-bashing, in Albanian culture. It was an instructive reminder that you invite the globe to the Globe at your moral peril.

Ever since the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz documented the debauchery of South Wales nightlife in a series called Cardiff at Night, there has been a kind of perverse glamour in images of scantily clad girls and young women falling down drunk whilst roaming gangs of check-shirted “roiders” look on gormlessly. Being as Swansea’s nightlife is, as depicted here, even “scruttier” – to use the evocative local parlance (think “slut” meets “scrubber” and you’ve got it) – than that of the capital, an artistic documentation of Swansea at Night was inevitable at some point.

From theatre viewed through peepholes and camera obscuras to a dance piece you watch across a wasteland while wearing headphones, this year the Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe seem to be fixated with ways of seeing. Hot on the heels of the premiere of dreamthinkspeak’s fishbowl Hamlet came a revival of Vanishing Point’s gorgeous Interior, in which we watched a wintry dinner party unfold wordlessly through the windows of the house. Inside, they ate, drank and danced, felt irritation and fondness, loneliness and love.

The concept sounds like something dreamed up towards the bottom of a bottle in a Harare shebeen: Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by two gentlemen in Shona. But if any of the plays can withstand the stripped-down treatment, it’s the likeable but formulaic early comedy featuring a couple of chums who compete for the same girl. In this account, two actors undertook to perform all the roles with only a few bits of cloth and considerable acting chops to see them through. On a drizzly spring afternoon at the Globe, it was utterly delightful.

Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”.

David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets.

Simon Stephens is not only one of our most talented playwrights, he’s also the one most open to influences from German theatre. In 2007, he collaborated with director Sebastian Nübling on the world premiere in Hanover of his innovative play, Pornography, which took more than a year to be staged in the UK, in a superb version by Sean Holmes. Holmes is now head of the Lyric Hammersmith, which hosts Stephens’s latest collaboration with Nübling.

This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s version.

The demands of Titus Andronicus are probably at odds with the constraints of the Globe to Globe season: a travelling troupe would find it hard to get 80 gallons of fake blood through Customs. Nor are they likely to be furnished with the sort of special effects – removable hands, slittable throats – which the play needs.