Forget Branagh and Mel Gibson, set aside thoughts of Olivier: Innokenti Smoktunovsky is the most original Hamlet you'll see on screen. As for King Lear, don't bother with Peter Brook's woeful attempts to be the British Eisenstein in a true cinedisaster; another master of the Russian cinema, Grigori Kozintsev, knew much better what to do in 1971.

Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the Haymarket stage, staff in hand, the West End's latest exercise in starry Shakespeare bristles with a quietly baleful urgency that erupts occasionally into a roar.

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?

It's the hard-hitting hoedown of high summer. Old Vic supremo Kevin Spacey being reunited with director Sam Mendes for the first time since 1999's American Beauty was bound to make 'em whoop, and their new production of Richard III doesn't disappoint. It's big, bellicose and full of braggadocio, as it should be: the play works best as a series of melodramatic blasts - Gloucester's opening soliloquy, his wooing of Lady Anne, Queen Margaret's curses, Gloucester's mock reluctance at becoming king, his nightmare and defeat as King Richard at Bosworth.

As further proof that Shakespeare plays come these days not as single spies but in battalions, the London leg of the all-male Propeller ensemble's lengthy tour has pitched up in the capital in time to deliver their Richard III within days of Kevin Spacey's debut in that very role at the Old Vic. Think of it as the battle for supremacy over the Bard's second-longest play or not, one thing seems clear: you're unlikely to find as abundantly bloody and brutal an account of this particular Shakespearean horror show for some while to come. Is director Edward Hall bidding to become the British theatre's very own Tobe Hooper? On the dazzling evidence of his Richard, that would appear to be the case.

It's not often that we in the critical world revisit a production towards the end of a run to see how it's settled. I had two reasons for wanting to return to Christopher Alden's English National Opera production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. First, I wanted to hear the liquid-gold countertenor of Iestyn Davies in action as Oberon, since he'd been voice-indisposed for one night only (and superbly doubled in that capacity by William Towers).

There’s a lovely moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Peter Quince assigns roles to his company of rude mechanicals. Unsatisfied with the part of the hero, Bottom interrupts, insisting he be allowed to play not only Pyramus but heroine Thisbe too, as well of course as the murderous lion. It’s hard not to see just a little of Bottom’s eagerness in Simon Callow’s Being Shakespeare – a one-man show penned by Jonathan Bate that casts Callow as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lear, Falstaff and Puck.

Lightning hasn't quite struck twice at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where Trevor Nunn's dazzling reclamation of early Terence Rattigan (Flare Path) has been followed by the same director's transfer from Chichester of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's first play. How does this 1966 gloss on Hamlet by way of Beckett hold up today? Engagingly enough, not least when its two tireless leads are in full existentialist flow. But some may nonetheless feel a degree of exhaustion, however much they'll want to cheer Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker on.

The Royal Ballet says it is inviting a new audience to experience the thrill of live ballet by taking Romeo and Juliet to the gigantic O2. Beware what you wish for. It’s the thrill of the live audience I’m starting with before I get onto the splendid show. Sweet packets rustled behind my ear, fish and chips were wolfed nearby, pizza shared, drinks slurped. People were still entering in droves 30 minutes after the start, obstructing the view of Juliet’s first scene. People were late back for Act II, triumphantly bringing the beers and crisps in, better late than never.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company seemed to be falling apart in the late 1990s, there was genuine cause for concern. The troupe had no automatic monopoly over performances of Shakespeare, nor could it claim a very particular style in its stagings. But since the 1960s it had held a special place at the higher end of British theatre culture as the natural, and national, promoter and evolver of the world’s greatest body of plays. By 2001, under artistic director Adrian Noble, the RSC was out of London, in retreat in Stratford-upon-Avon, and looking punctured. It was an unhappy sight.