Othello, Trafalgar Studios

For someone who until very recently had an avowed dislike of Shakespeare, stand-up comic Lenny Henry makes a decent fist of Othello. It’s an astonishing role in which to make his stage acting debut - complex emotions are expressed in rhetorical gymnastics and he’s rarely off stage - but not for one moment does one believe Henry guilty of hubris. Rather, this is a man who has come to the Bard late (Henry is now 51) and clearly fallen in love with him.

Kurt & Sid, Trafalgar 2 Studios, Whitehall

The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 has provided a densely populated field of daydreams for conspiracy theorists, several of whom hotly insist that the troubled avatar of Grunge was murdered. Conversely, he may be playing in a ZZ Top covers band in Peru with Elvis and Jim Morrison. Whatever, playwright Roy Smiles has pursued a more original angle.

Picking up on a rumour that there had been somebody with Cobain on the night of his suicide, Smiles exploits Cobain's well-...

Judgment Day, Almeida

Fresh from scripting one of the year's feeblest films, Stephen Frears's Michelle Pfeiffer-love-in Chéri, Christopher Hampton has turned his translating hand to a solid 20th-century German drama. Ödön von Horváth's late-1930s Judgment Day is not a bad play, but the Almeida Theatre's new staging of it struggles to convince us that it's worth making that much of a modern fuss about.