It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably adapted into films that pile on the visual beauty of its magical settings. This enterprising venue may be surrounded by trees and foliage, but it offers essentially a big bare stage with few frills.

Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.

Every day this week I’m watching a football match, and now – after April’s production of Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon’s Gunter – comes another football stage drama to tear up the turf at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.

Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. 

A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023. So it makes sense that director Jude Christian has addressed this tricky, troubling Shakespeare play by amplifying the genuine trauma caused by Petruchio’s “taming” of his wife Katharina.

You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still delightful) 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's most popular novel, is no exception.

There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. 

Alice Childress’s Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a weapon that casts a bright light over its target even as it ferociously burns it. 

Times change, people don't. Does a knighthood sit well on a man who shags anonymous strangers in the Blue Lion out of hours? Emlyn Williams played his own fruity lead when his play Accolade premiered in 1950 - Bill Trenting, a hugely successful writer of seamy bestsellers who (improbably) is about to be knighted and (still more improbably) won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but who will be publicly exposed for his double life enjoying promiscuous stranger-sex in Rotherhithe bars, if he doesn't pay his blackmailer.