Terence Rattigan's beautifully spoken characters are a passionate lot in this gripping story of a father's fight to prove his son's innocence. Lindsay Posner's production of the 1946 play succors and seduces its audience with an unstoppable determination to prove that right will be done. Its methods may not be subtle, but its effects are no less stirring.

Here’s an elegant thing to do before eight o'clock dinner - stroll out for an hour’s recital of a rollicking story-poem done by a leading actress in a hip underground venue with judiciously hip application of modern dance, then go off and diss it over your sushi. Very London life.

Cole Porter’s musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn’s revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, it’s more like gelato. It has sweetness, and a rich abundance of detail, but it’s also thick, cloying, and somewhat bland. There’s plenty of stagey pizzazz on display, but it too often feels strained and soulless. The production lingers when it should zing, and despite some fine song and dance, it never conjures either the sexual heat or the showbiz buzz that should set it sparkling.

Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead.

You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."

A director who is “passionate about biology”; a humorist who “hardly ever mocks”; an artist who speaks fluently about the origin of species; a non-musician who has directed some of the best-received opera productions of the modern era; a doctor with his own profile on IMDB. In short, a man who puts the “poly” into “polymath” – and like as not does it in Greek. Don’t you just hate Jonathan Miller?

This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of the night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But even as the fake blood flows and the gurglings mount, Jamie Lloyd's sturdy but sometimes sluggish production of John Webster's masterpiece (c 1614) isn't exactly gripping.

Site-specific work has been flavour of the month for many many months now, and when the site is as spectacular as the Old Vic Tunnels, one understands why. Nearly 3,000 square metres of tunnelling under Waterloo Station (the trains rumble steadily overhead), the site has in its year as a venue been the location of the first showing of Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a participant in last year’s LIFT festival, and Alan Moore, the V for Vendetta graphic comic genius, even read there.

The play-within-a-play device has honourable antecedents - playwrights from Thomas Kyd and Anton Chekhov through to Bertolt Brecht and Tennessee Williams have flirted with it, while Shakespeare loved it so much that he used it in several of his plays, most famously in Hamlet.

It's difficult for modern theatregoers – in or beyond Ireland – to understand the extraordinary furore The Playboy of the Western World caused when it was first performed in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Protesters, who believed the play was a slur on the Irish people, gathered at the theatre and drowned out performances with their shouting, and there were even cries of “Kill the author”.