Are there any real taboos left? I mean, there have been scores of plays about incest, about abuse and about paedophilia. Have all proverbial stones been turned over? According to Deborah Bruce, a director turned playwright, there is one situation that still troubles people, especially women: it is mothers who leave their children. Although this is a staple of women’s magazines, there have been few plays about the subject. So Bruce’s new drama is welcome — and it comes with the always watchable Helen Baxendale as its star.

Rona Munro’s trilogy of plays about Scotland’s Stuart kings premiered at the Edinburgh Festival when Scottish independence was, for many, still a cherished possibility; it transfers to London – within a clarion call of Westminster – just as the promise has been dashed. As timely as the National’s recent Great Britain, the trilogy is more than merely opportune, resonating with the anger and frustration of centuries.

Prince Charles’s “black spider letters” - his attempts to influence or change government policy - are real, as is the government’s long collusion with Clarence House to keep them from the public, despite the efforts of The Guardian in particular to expose them. This gives Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III, an imagining of the next king becoming a champion of press freedom, a sharply ironic edge deep below its already very entertaining satire.

While it is something of a cliché to be reminded that forgetting the past is a sure way of repeating it, the problems of the Middle East are so acute that this thought might be worth taking seriously. In Holy Warriors, playwright David Eldridge’s new look at the struggle for Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Middle Ages to the present day, the scope is ambitious and the subject matter as timely as can be. But is the play any good?

Theatre-maker Tim Crouch has a thing about art. One of his plays, ENGLAND, was performed in art galleries across the world; another was called An Oak Tree, after the 1973 conceptual art piece by Michael Craig-Martin. In fact, Crouch even looks like an arty type. Now, in his latest production, he tells a story about two fictional artists: Janet Adler and her lover Margaret Gibb. But, really, his main theme, as ever, is the relationship between art and reality.

Some days, I feel very sorry for playwrights, especially those that become notorious through no fault of their own. If their most famous play causes enough controversy, it can take decades before people forget it. So now, 10 years since Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s early play, Behtzi (Dishonour) caused violent protests at the Birmingham Rep because of its depiction of a rape in a Sikh temple, I can’t think of any other way of starting this review of her latest without mentioning it.

If rock is magic, then what about its creators? Are they wonderful magicians, or empty charlatans? Infused by the spirit of the Patti Smith song of the same name, playwright Simon Stephens’s new play puts a rock star centre stage — and then lets him implode. Given that he is played by Andrew Scott, one of the most charismatic actors of the British stage, the result is often compelling. Add to the mix some beautifully sculpted visual effects, care of Carrie Cracknell, who directed the award-winning A Doll’s House, and the result is certainly memorable.

It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invincible is therefore something rare, for it turns social distinctions into compelling comic drama.

Alan Ayckbourn is generally considered to be the master of this kind of writing. Given that, it is perhaps unsurprising that Invincible's writer, Torben Betts, has worked as a resident dramatist at Ayckbourn's famous stomping ground, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

What exactly is unconventional about an unconventional couple? In Abi Morgan’s new two-hander, an adaptation of last year’s book of the same name by She and He (a West Coast American couple now aged 90ish), the situation is simple. Boy meets girl at college, they lose touch, then meet again 20 years later, when both are married with kids. When they start an affair things go wobbly, but then she asks him to sign an agreement: in return for a house and income, she will provide him with “mistress services”.

The best thing about this show is its title

You can’t accuse Nick Payne of being fainthearted. His new play explores what it means to be a woman and it features a wonderful all-woman cast. But wait a minute: isn’t he a man? And what do men really know about being a woman? You see what I mean about needing courage for this project? The good news is that this is a experimental evening based on a good idea. But what’s it like as theatre?

The play conveys no sense of lived female experience