These two 1960s movies have more than just their director, Joseph Losey, and their writer, Harold Pinter, in common. They also both star Dirk Bogarde, escaping his matinee idol mould to startling effect, and feature soundtrack composer John Dankworth, whose jazzy scores cleverly veer between generic sexy swagger and disorientating dissonance, as and when appropriate.

This production of Old Times is a big deal. It’s the first of Harold Pinter’s plays to be performed in the theatre renamed after him; it marks the reunion of director Ian Rickson and Kristin Scott Thomas, after their exhilarating Betrayal; and it feels like a seminal reading, involving a casting conceit that makes a rich work even richer, even more mesmerising.

The London theatre looks to be awash in great women of the English (and Irish) stage in a 2013 line-up of star roles that disproves the often-held assertion that the men get all the great stuff. Those who missed Hattie Morahan's award-winning Nora last summer in A Doll's House will have a second chance at the Young Vic in April, while Kim Cattrall brings her singular glamour to Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic come the summer.

Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature.

This November, experimental theatre company Hydrocracker will bring The New World Order – a site-specific cycle of five Pinter plays – to a former government building in Hackney. Doubtless the immersive impact will add disquieting emphasis to Pinter’s dark tales of totalitarian power and abuse of authority, but if you prefer your Pinter a served a little straighter, briefer and with greater intimacy, then the Young Vic’s miniature double-bill One For The Road/Victoria Station offers a fairly devastating warm-up act.

I see there are still a few brave souls trying to peddle the "searing televisual masterpiece" line, often in high-profile BBC publications, but I suspect rather more of us may have been veering towards an ever-healthier scepticism as Hugo Blick's wilfully obtuse noirathon ran around in increasingly demented circles.

This is a play that begins after the end of an affair, and threads its precise, forensic way back to the very beginning of it. As the lovers are awkwardly reunited after two years, the theme of deceit as a web of competing and ambiguous claims is firmly established. Jerry, a literary agent, has learned that Emma, the wife of his oldest and dearest friend, with whom he had an affair for seven years, may now be having an adulterous relationship with one of his writers.

It’s a quirk of the acting profession that someone can fly under the radar for years and then suddenly be catapulted into the limelight. Nigel Lindsay's impeccable record in contemporary plays at the Donmar, Almeida and Royal Court has left all but keen theatre-goers with only a dim sense of his distinctive profile. He is currently performing his most high-profile role yet - unless you count the doltish white Muslim jihadist Barry in Four Lions. But one thing will not change. To play the grouchy Scottish ogre in Shrek the Musical (in which he's been coached by his old mate David Tennant), Lindsay will spend 90 minutes before every performance having prosthetic make-up applied. When he walks out of the stage door, the junior hordes won’t know him from the doorman.

It’s a quirk of the acting profession that someone can fly under the radar for years and then suddenly be catapulted into the limelight. Nigel Lindsay's impeccable record in contemporary plays at the Donmar, Almeida and Royal Court has left all but keen theatre-goers with only a dim sense of his distinctive profile. He is currently performing his most high-profile role yet - unless you count the doltish white Muslim jihadist Barry in Four Lions. But one thing will not change. To play the grouchy Scottish ogre in Shrek the Musical (in which he's been coached by his old mate David Tennant), Lindsay will spend 90 minutes before every performance having prosthetic make-up applied. When he walks out of the stage door, the junior hordes won’t know him from the doorman.

One wants to be antagonised by Harold Pinter. In his substantial early dramas (The Homecoming, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party), aggression and menace coil through the texts like rattlesnakes. He was, then, revolutionary. Maybe it's glib - critical shorthand - to suggest that there were, thereafter, two to three decades of falling away; but some of us might feel that much of his later work either became hijacked by his belligerent, unnuanced politics or, simply and contrastingly, softened.

The relationship between stage and screen has always been fraught with antagonism and suspicion. One working in two dimensions, the other in three, they don't speak the same visual language. But recent events have helped to eat away at the status quo. On the one hand, theatre has grown increasingly intrigued by the design properties of film. Flat screens have popped up all over the place, notably in Katie Mitchell’s National shows and at the more ambitious work of the ENO. Meanwhile, theatre and opera have been encouraging those who, for reasons of distance or price, can’t make it to the show itself to catch it on a cinema screen instead.