Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV cycle locks together the first modern plays in English. They strive for something quite new in drama, retaining a structural boldness and complexity seldom encountered in contemporary theatre. That's how "modern" they are (or seem). And in reiterating what others must have said oft and better, I intend no abutment on that deadly phrase “early modern” into which historians, and most annoyingly many literary critics, now incorporate the word “Renaissance” - which Henry IV of course also magnificently is.

The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.

Jeff Goldblum is a big guy, 6'4" tall to be precise, and, though his character inhabits an improbably spacious, high-ceilinged New York apartment, he roves around it like a crazy caged animal in this intensely athletic and entertaining revival of Neil Simon's disturbing 1971 comedy.

"Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" It’s a cry that has echoed through the childhood of generations of English children, reducing all but the very staunchest to tears. Whether encountered through Edith Nesbit’s book or the classic 1970 film, The Railway Children is a national touchstone, sitting alongside Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at the core of a proper English upbringing.

Infamously, the first production of La Bête, David Hirson's literary satire set in 17th-century France and written in rhyming couplets, closed in New York after only 25 performances. No such bleak fate is likely to attend this London (and Broadway-bound) revival nearly two decades on, powered as it is by three top-octane stars: Joanna Lumley, David Hyde Pierce and, above all, Mark Rylance, fresh from Jerusalem.

The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly to hippie heaven. Choked by clouds of fragrant perfume, weird in its singsong language and thrilling in its strangeness, this seemed like an ideal way of realising the crazy vision of this odd piece. But theatre is not about being faithful to fond memories, it’s about the constant restaging of classic plays, so this new version of Wilde’s 1892 play offers a welcome chance to reassess it.

The second season of the Bridge Project - a transatlantic relationship forged between between Kevin Spacey, artistic director at the Old Vic in London, theatre and film director Sam Mendes, and Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music - which aims to make theatrical connections in a series of cross-cast co-productions with American and British actors, has opened with a double header of Shakespeare.

“Tragedy reminds us how to live,” declares Moira Buffini’s democratically elected heroine, Eurydice. It’s a reminder the playwright herself and her latest work, Welcome to Thebes, is eager to provide. Following on the well-worn heels of last season’s Mother Courage at the National comes a new play that once again places women in the front line. Leaving to Brecht the barren fields of Western Europe, Buffini sets up her stall in the fertile dramatic ground of contemporary Africa – a place where gang-rape and murder are just the prologue.