Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen is an institution in the States, running on Broadway since 2016 and currently on its second year of a national tour.

It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut.

Paul Essinger has quit life as a professional tennis player and retired to his native Texas where, over the course of seven days, he and his extended family are due to spend Christmas at his parents’ family home.

Even the mighty Almeida is allowed the occasional dud and it’s sure as hell got one at the moment with Vassa. Maxim Gorky’s 1910 play (rewritten in 1935) about a matriarch in extremis some years back proved a stonking West End star vehicle for Sheila Hancock. It offers a chance to go hell-for-leather that should set the pulse racing.

Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic.

Equal measures class system satire and Scream or Saw genre knockoff, Ready or Not is entirely appalling, except perhaps to those forgiving hipsters in the crowd who will view its ineptitude as some deliberate "meta" statement all its own. Nonsensical on virtually every level and as badly acted as it is written and directed, this celluloid amalgam of comedy and horror wears its coolness on a distinctly blood-spattered sleeve: my sympathies go out to all involved. 

Mother of Him was written a decade ago, but its most prescient moment happens in the first five minutes of Max Lindsay's production at the Park Theatre. Brenda Kapowitz (Tracy-Ann Oberman) presents a sheaf of papers to Robert (Simon Hepworth, excellent), a family friend who’s also her 17-year-old son’s lawyer. “Report cards, awards,” she explains.

The cancer weepie is knocked off its tear-jerking axis by Lulu Wang’s sly and heartfelt autobiographical tale.

London’s latest theatre opening brings a stirring revival of Harvey Fierstein’s vital gay drama, which premiered as Torch Song Trilogy in New York at the beginning of the 1980s, the playwright himself unforgettable in the lead, before it opened in London in 1985 with Antony Sher.

With power comes responsibility. One without the other is sickening -- and both iterations are on show in Emma Kinane's searing new play about a child runaway in New Zealand.