Rosalind’s “working-day world” takes an unexpectedly literal turn in Polly Findlay’s sparky new As You Like It for the National Theatre. An opening sequence, set in a windowless trading-floor, opens out in one of the year’s most bewitching set transformations into a brown and scrubby Forest of Arden, whose flowers bloom all the brighter for their delayed appearance. The action too, stilted at first, blossoms as Arden works its magic, delaying but not ultimately denying us the pastoral comedy we signed up for.

If the thought of three hours of DH Lawrence fills you with dread, fear not. Ben Powers’ inspired melding of Lawrence’s trio of mining plays births a spellbindingly intimate epic with atmosphere thick as the coal dust engulfing this cloistered 1911 East Midlands village. The community is powered and oppressed by the industrial machine swallowing up the menfolk, but our focus is on the women’s claustrophobic domestic sphere.

It’s not easy to see the pattern in Roger Michell’s career. More than most British directors, he has zigzagged between the stage and the screen. He was the one who first rehearsed such contemporary classics as Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange towards their premieres, he has regularly staged the works of Pinter, and yet he is also the director of Notting Hill.

Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre.

We all know what the word “addict” means, but what does it feel like to be one? Thirtysomething Emma – a minor actress played with immense conviction and quirky charm by Denise Gough – knows exactly. At one point in Duncan Macmillan’s engrossing new play, she says, “People who aren’t addicted to anything are really missing out, you know?” For the addict lives a life of glory: they feel complete, and loved and satisfied. Yes, that’s it. They love their addiction – and their addiction loves them back.

The political wheel has turned full-circle. When Our Country’s Good was premiered in 1988, it was a barely-veiled protest against Thatcher’s slash-and-burn approach to the arts in general and arts funding in particular. It couldn’t have returned at a more apt moment. Once again the arts are being forced to make a commercial case for their existence, to claw and squabble over scraps of government money, while the newspapers are filled with photos from Syria, of the apparent destruction of Palmyra.

Jason Hughes belongs to an influential generation of actors who emerged from South Wales in the 1990s. A promising rugby player as a teenager, his head was turned by theatre. Ruth Jones and Rob Brydon were only a few years above him at school in Porthcawl. In the National Youth Theatre of Wales he met Michael Sheen. The name may be less familiar, but the face is known from two very different Joneses whom Hughes has created on television: Warren Jones, the young gay lawyer in This Life, and Ben Jones, John Nettles’s sidekick in Midsomer Murders.

The trouble with the classics is that they are long, complex and difficult. But today’s sensibility favours the quick, simple and easy. So it is no surprise that the National Theatre have opened its doors to Patrick Marber, who has taken Ivan Turgenev’s 1850s play, A Month in the Country, and given it a makeover. After all, in its uncut original version it runs for four hours. The result is what the Amazon website calls an “unfaithful version”, which is shorter and simpler than the original. Turgenev’s month of rural love, lust and despair has been distilled down to some 72 hours.

The play I have just seen is not the play you will see. Of course, one of the draws of live performance is that no two nights are the same, but that idea is taken to a mesmerising extreme in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, celebrating its 10^th anniversary. Every night, a new guest actor – who has never seen the show nor read the script – joins Crouch in this two-hander; past playmates include Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand and Roger Lloyd Pack.

“We’re completely pro sex.” Rashdash, who collaborated with Alice Birch on this anarchic challenge to pornography, are not objecting on prudish grounds – their concern is the corrosive impact of degrading, dehumanising material. We are all affected, and we all need to seek a solution.