It’s huge, it’s just huge, said Benedict Cumberbatch, struggling to express the scale of the challenge that playing Hamlet presents.

If one definition of Shakespeare’s problem plays is that they can’t easily be categorised in the canon, being neither tragedy nor comedy, then that issue is swept aside by this radical Young Vic production. In the hands of director Joe Hill-Gibbins, Measure for Measure is incontrovertibly a comedy, careering between satire and feverish farce.

At the press night curtain call for Richard III, about eleven-and-a half hours after the beginning of this anniversary three-play production, Trevor Nunn stepped in front of his impressively large cast. Not usually a man of few words, this time he uttered only five: "Peter Hall and John Barton".

Opera North have an excellent track record when it comes to staging musicals, and Jo Davies’s Kiss Me, Kate is among the best things they’ve done. Cole Porter’s score and lyrics are flawless, though the book (by husband and wife team Bella and Samuel Spewick) is a little clunky. Act 1 is overlong, and the show’s close is a tad perfunctory. But what an erudite, wise piece.

The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’s all about the back story. Everything – Macbeth’s disdain for death in battle, Lady Macbeth’s descent into somnambulant madness – hinges on the loss of a child.

Jane Lapotaire's distinguished career on stage and screen was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage. She was giving a Shakespeare masterclass at the time and now, 15 years later, at the age of 70, she is once again acting on stage in Shakespeare.

New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense.

The set turns out to be the thing now that Benedict Cumberbatch's star turn in Hamlet has finally arrived, trailing in its wake a level of expectation, hysteria and scrutiny that might well have made many a lesser actor head for the hills.

The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality, from the moral tussle between King Richard and his cousin who will wrest the crown from him and become Henry IV, are, in reality, everywhere underfoot.

Roger Rees, whose death at the age of 71 was announced yesterday, never intended to act. He trained at the Slade and made extra money painting theatrical scenery. One day a director asked if he’d like to act, and he laid down his brush. The second time he applied to join the RSC, he got in. He stayed with the company for a now unimaginable 22 years and in due course became one of the great stars of British theatre in the 1980s.