Now nearing the end of its sixth series, Wild at Heart has quietly parked itself in the middle of the Sunday-evening schedules, where it goes about its task of hoovering up ratings with single-minded efficiency. Last week's debut of South Riding on BBC One was considered a triumph with 6.6 million viewers, but Wild at Heart pipped it with 6.8 million. The week before it scored over seven million.

When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.

So many stage shows (musicals, mostly) are these days fashioned from films that the arrival of Rabbit Hole reminds us of the time-honored habit of plundering yesteryear's Broadway hit for this movie season's trophy-minded bait. And so we have Nicole Kidman Oscar-nominated for her turn as the grieving mum in a part that won Cynthia Nixon New York's Tony Award five years ago.

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.

It's the right season for a frosty Lear. With people being frozen on the open road by temperatures rarely visited upon the land, we're reminded that nature can be our greatest adversary, that we're placed in the universe as much to fight its innate physical savagery as we are to fight each other. With the exception of The Winter's Tale and As You Like It, with which King Lear keeps close thematic company, Shakespeare's plays don't really address the wild outdoors.

Can you go home again? That's the question that will be hanging over the Royal Shakespeare Company's first residency at the Roundhouse since their "History Play" cycle stormed north London over two years ago, reminding those lucky enough to catch it of the loss to the capital ever since the RSC opted out of a London base of operations.

What's the Greek for "oy"? All the bouzouki dancing and retsina in the world wouldn't be enough to make a satisfying play out of Onassis, Martin Sherman's rewrite of his own Aristo, seen two years ago at Chichester with the same director (long-time Sherman collaborator Nancy Meckler) and absolutely invaluable leading man (Robert Lindsay). The star gives the piece his customary highly theatrical all, in the process making you think perhaps the material really is the stuff of genuine tragedy. But all the high-flown talk of "destiny" and whatnot can't shift what Onassis actually is - less a fully realised drama than a celebrity flow-chart on stage.

Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.

The National Theatre’s new production of Hamlet is both a very good Hamlet, yet also a somehow disappointing one. For a work so rich in possibilities, with so much emotion, so much superb and intricate engineering, it is often like this, in England or anywhere else - inspiring and unconvincing at once.

For 15 years after the death of his demon muse Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog made documentaries about equally obsessive visionaries, climaxing five years ago with Grizzly Man’s tale of Timothy Treadwell, who loved and was eaten by bears. Though the documentaries continue, Herzog is now finally re-engaging with feature films. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was made back-to-back with Bad Lieutenant and shares some of its cast.