The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close’s lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discrepancy between seeming and being. Which is the theme, too, of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ peerless epistolary novel.

New York, in the early 1950s. Twenty-something Therese Belivet is working in a Manhattan department store at Christmas, wearing a Santa hat and dutifully trying to overcome her boredom. Then Carol Aird strides into view – classy, confident, patrician Carol, archly eyeing the shop girl and nonchalantly buying the most expensive toy on offer, before leaving her gloves on the counter behind her. Therese’s life is about to change dramatically.

With real live birds fluttering across the stage, and a sweetly happy ending – hurrah for young love! – Frederick Ashton's 1961 The Two Pigeons can look like mere frothy fantasy, precisely the kind of trivial, uncomplicated ballet plot that the young Kenneth MacMillan was reacting against in his own work in the early 60s. Is its return to the repertoire after an absence of 30 years just the Royal Ballet pandering to the escapist fantasies of its audiences – who, director Kevin O'Hare reveals, have been clamouring for this revival?

Kim Longinotto’s Love Is All stitches together short extracts from 75 different films, aiming to highlight changing British attitudes to love, sex and romance. It opens with a one-minute 1899 short which looks forward to the closing shot of Hitchcock's North By Northwest, and the final montage includes scenes from My Beautiful Laundrette and news footage of a same-sex wedding in 2014 Islington. It’s frequently a frustrating viewing experience: the short running-time means that most of the clips are just too brief.

If you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumenau’s production of Craig Baxter’s play, based loosely around the Trollope novel of the same name and commissioned by the Trollope Society to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth, speeds through its two-hour-plus run, keeping a nimble crew of seven on its toes and the audience engaged in its ludic conspiracies.

We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it’s easy to forget a time when plays were introduced, interrupted and even accompanied by a pit orchestra playing music specially composed by the greatest composers of the day. We now hear this music as concert overtures and suites: Egmont, Peer Gynt, L’Arlésienne, and the like.

American actress Lake Bell turns in a rather charming performance in a romcom written by newcomer Tess Morris, who handles the insecurities of a thirty-something woman looking for love in a funny and energetic way.

There's a manic screwball edge to the comedy and some witty one-liners but also present are some of the worst pitfalls of this genre. The Inbetweeners director, Ben Palmer, takes the reins in a film which dashes across famous London landmarks and the back roads of suburban England with verve. When Nancy (Lake Bell) is gifted a romantic self-help book by a woman on a train who’s due to meet a blind date at Waterloo station she becomes embroiled in a case of mistaken identity. She takes a chance, steals her blind date, a forty-something man named Jack (Simon Pegg) and ends up having a wonderful time.

There's some Richard Curtis-style surface level humour in the supporting characters who fill the desperate weirdo quota

That is, until he finds out she's not who she says she is and they wind up on an incredibly awkward double date with his ex. Morris and Palmer inject the first half of the date with a spontaneity that superbly captures the excitement of meeting a potential suitor who could end up to being the one. Morris also does a fantastic job of making her lead characters as fully rounded as possible within the constraints of the romantic comedy formula. Though there's some Richard Curtis-style surface level humour in the supporting characters who fill the desperate weirdo quota, her two leads are brilliantly sketched.

Jack is suffering from a broken heart, his bitter ways and head-in-the-clouds attitude threatening to ruin his chances of finding a new partner. We first meet Nancy in a hotel psyching herself up to attend a wedding reception: she's working on her self-esteem and confidence via a handy to-do list which includes getting stronger thighs. Morris makes Nancy a wholly relatable character and nicely balances her cynicism with a healthy dose of sincere positivity. Olivia Williams appears as Jack’s soon to be ex-wife in a role that doesn't really offer much other than a stereotype. Considering Morris makes fun of the fact that Jack is initially set up with a 24-year-old it's a bit odd that he eventually finds a romantic connection with someone 10 years his junior and younger than his ex.

Still, it's better than the alternative and backs up the idea within the film that there is no special recipe in the quest for a partner. It's all about the spark. Lake Bell’s British accent is spot on and her ability to switch between cracking jokes and emotionally wrought is impressive indeed. Simon Pegg is finely tuned to the everyman character and his performance recalls his endearing early work from Shaun of the Dead. They make for an amiable pairing in a hugely enjoyable and fast-paced comedy.

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