Can Thomas Heywood's prosy Jacobean drama of country folk hunting, card playing, screwing around, sliding aristocratically into debt and harrowing one another to death translate successfully to the aftermath of the First World War? Only, perhaps, as edgy semi-farce, towards which Katie Mitchell's nervy, twilit production sometimes veers, not often intentionally. Acting to make you half believe in impossible characters might have saved it. But here you spend less time focusing on the poor puppets who flap around Mitchell's claustrophobic world than looking at the handsome, haunting set.

Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?

There be dragons aplenty, angels, demons and ghastly creatures both fleshy and feathered in the Globe Theatre’s inaugural production of Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe’s take on the familiar Faust legend, bold in its religious content, was a controversial hit of its day, but the play’s almost medieval apposition of high thinking and knockabout farce by no means guarantees it success in the contemporary theatre. If Matthew Dunster and his team of actors fail with any of their audience it won’t be for want of trying. Throwing themselves at the material with characteristic Globe energy, theirs is a Faustus of pageantry and spectacle.

Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core?

Travelling by Eurostar, or plane, to the continent and buying a ticket, all for less than the cost of a Covent Garden stalls seat, might entice if you wanted to see a certain opera, singer or conductor. But to go so far for the look of a staging? Well, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus’s phantasmagorical ENO production of Ligeti's Le grand macabre has left some of us hungry for more, which so far means going abroad to find it. Ultimately their latest Wagner doesn't always rise to the expected visionary heights, but it does boast world-class music-making and, wonder of wonders, real interaction between the singers on a human scale.

John Ford’s tragedy‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, set in the Italian city of Parma, tells the story of a young brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella, who discover a mutual love for each other and embark on a passionate sexual relationship. The challenges of family, church and society increasingly curtail their freedom to pursue their desires, and the play culminates in a terrifyingly brutal and bloody climax. When Ford wrote the play, probably in the late 1620s, he was in his forties and was nearing 50 when it was published in 1633. The play is so often talked about as if the work of a rebellious, youthful writer, keen to shock, whereas it is more accurately viewed as a considered portrayal of a complex sexual relationship by a mature author. It is revived this week by West Yorkshire Playhouse.

As the makers of The Kennedys discovered recently, turning history into TV drama can be like locking yourself in the stocks and inviting all-comers to hurl coconuts at your head. This dramatisation of the 1950s Manchester United team and its traumatic near-destruction in the 1958 Munich air disaster has been duly lambasted by Sandy Busby, the son of former Manchester United manager Matt Busby, and others who were affected by the real-life events.

Certain big dramas can work really well in small places. Sophocles’s revenge play Electra (end of the fifth century BC) is as consequential, and influential, as they come; the Gate Theatre one of the smallest spaces in London. It continually produces sparky, original productions of old and new work.

Dark this new one-act drama by American playwright Neil LaBute may be; deep, not so much. It has all the author’s usual hallmarks: an accumulation of sinister tension, disturbing sexual politics, the threat of violence. And in a taut, pacey production heralded by an opening soundtrack of punishingly loud grunge-rock music and directed by LaBute himself, it’s acted with conviction by Olivia Williams and Matthew Fox, best known for TV’s Lost. The writing also makes murkily playful use of fairytale imagery and undercurrents of classical tragedy.