Misery and comedy have always been happy bedfellows. The sad clown, the stand-up who falls down offstage – we know who we’re talking about. But for all their problems, comedians don’t generally make a habit of turning medical pathology into material. Until now. Ruby Wax has crafted an entire show out of her depression. Anyone who has seen her glorious documentary interviews with Pamela Anderson and Imelda Marcos, to name a couple, might have guessed she is manic. But a depressive?

“It’s this ghost they’re talkin’ about. I’m feelin’ an emanation meself. Unless I ‘ad too many pickled eggs last night.” If that’s the sort of crack that tickles your fancy, you’ll find plenty to make you chuckle in Ken Hill’s spoofish take on H G Wells’s novella, first presented at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1991. Should you also have a taste for rather well-worn magic tricks, you might find Ian Talbot’s new production positively transporting.

There are any number of ways, it's increasingly clear, to approach A Number. Caryl Churchill's astonishingly prismatic and beautiful play about genetic cloning, nature versus nurture and the ineffable mystery of existence as amplified by Shakespeare in a certain well-known tragedy gets its latest London airing this week. To be (happy) or not to be (happy)? That's among the various questions raised in a two-hander (albeit with four characters) that runs less than an hour; any longer than that and your brain just might explode.

The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.

Broadway tends to go into overdrive in May, that time of the theatrical year when New York stages are at their buzziest in the run-up to the Tony Awards (to be awarded on 13 June).

"Fun! Laughs! Good times!" Anyone remember them? That snatch of lyrics from Sweet Charity, the 1960s musical that lifted Broadway to newly brassy heights and has been frequently revived on both sides of the Atlantic, serves as an apt summation of the Menier Chocolate Factory's latest musical crowd-pleaser, which, like Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, and La Cage aux Folles before it, surely has the West End in its sights.

Talent, Victoria Wood’s first play, premiered at the Sheffield Crucible in 1978 and was made into a television drama the following year for ITV. Roger Glossop asked Wood to revisit the work for a festival he runs at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and last night it transferred to the Menier Chocolate Factory in south London, another delightful small powerhouse that punches well above its weight in the arts world.