Arnold Wesker has a theory that plays require a certain DNA to endure. When thoughts turn to the 1950s and the revolution in British theatre which allowed ordinary working-class life up onto the stage, the name which always comes up is John Osborne. And yet the game-changing Look Back in Anger now looks like a bloated and tiresome rant. Wesker’s work has stood the test of time far more robustly.

Britain today: while the total of car crashes is falling the number of whiplash claims is rising by 25 per cent. Yes, the compensation culture is speeding ahead. In Nick Payne’s follow up to his immensely successful West End transfer, Constellations, a firm of personal injury claims lawyers is the setting for a scam in which a money-spinning lie goes wrong. It’s the stuff of many a Newsnight report, but can he make a social issue interesting as a drama?

Can theatrical lightning strike twice? That certainly looks to be the case at the Donmar, which has followed Josie Rourke's expert revival of Conor McPherson's contemporary classic, The Weir, with the world premiere of McPherson's latest, directed with a deft finger on both the human and numinous pulse by the author himself.

Conor McPherson’s 1997 play has become a modern classic, and it's not difficult to see why. It's a glorious evening of storytelling that allows the cast to display their wares, as the conversation between characters who have known each other all their lives flows and ebbs as they reminisce, josh and cajole each other with both affection and darker, underlying feelings. Such naturalistic conversation is, strangely enough, often hard to present with authenticity, but when it's done well - as it is here - one forgets this is acting. We could be eavesdropping on real people chatting.

His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stage himself. Redolent with the smell of “gas and oranges”, Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawny of The Wells is not just any play, but a play about the business of theatre-making - a sentimental romance between life and art that hides its simpering blushes behind a veil of farcical comedy.

It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives are rather charming? This is the play for you.

There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppression – “our yoke and sufferance make us womanish” – the issue is written into the language and ideological fabric of the play.

An expert cast delivers on their promise in Aleksei Arbuzov's triangular Russian drama from 1965 of the same name, which offers up war and peace and the shifting tides of love. There's so much of the last, in fact, that Alex Sims's production at times plays out like Design For Living set against a soundscape of shelling and the occasional nod to Hitler and Stalin.

It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! ends in its Donmar invocation with the roar of a plane taking off, which only amplifies one’s sense that the show has taken some while to take wing. Markedly better after the interval than during an abrasive first half, the director Lindsey Turner’s determinedly unsentimental take on Brian Friel’s breakthrough 1964 play comes at a price, and some may wonder whether the (very real) pay-off is worth the often snarky ride getting there.