Winston Smith is alone. Isolated in a pool of light, with an anglepoise lamp at his shoulder, he is about to pen the first entry in his private diary. But he is, of course, being watched. Mark Arends' Winston is, after all, living in the nightmarish superstate where Big Brother keeps every citizen perpetually under surveillance, even when they don’t know it.

Among the multiple achievements of American Psycho, any one of which might be enough to make Rupert Goold's long-awaited Almeida season-opener the banner musical of a notably busy year for the form, a particular paradox deserves mention up front. Here's a piece steeped in material (the Bret Easton Ellis novel from 1991 and its film version nine years later) that fetishises surfaces and wallows in emptiness and that - a grand hurrah! - turns out itself to have a lot to say.

In the season of goodwill a new musical based on Bret Easton Ellis’ notorious novel American Psycho might earn itself the subtitle “NOT the Christmas Show” - but when the composer is Duncan Sheik, he of the sensational Spring Awakening, and the director Rupert Goold, fresh into his artistic stewardship of the Almeida Theatre, all bets are off. There’s even a number entitled “Mistletoe Alert” - so the season of rampant consumerism might well prove just the time to launch one of the most anticipated musicals of this or any season.

In a moment of scalding intensity at the climax of Ghosts, terrified Oswald sees the sun. Throughout the rest of Ibsen’s celebrated drama about the sins of the past, light is fairly absent. Merely cataloguing the disasters that befall its heroine Mrs Alving would certainly indicate a play living up to Ibsen’s bad reputation as the leading dramatist of doom and gloom.

It’s as dazzling as a neon-lit cityscape and nearly as sprawling: Lucy Kirkwood’s epic new drama is rich, riveting and theatrically audacious. A co-production with Headlong, the tirelessly inventive touring company founded by Rupert Goold, it feels like an early statement of intent for Goold’s upcoming tenure as artistic director of the Almeida, which begins this September. Fizzing with wit and intelligent ideas, it’s handled with impeccable flair by director Lyndsey Turner. The results are stunning.

There are quite a few laughs in this new adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s chilling and ambiguous novella, written in 1897 after he was told a tale of children possessed by their deceased household servants. As a result I found this production thoroughly entertaining, while appreciating that not all the laughs were intentional.

There’s no attempt to romanticise the hero of Nick Dear’s new play about the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas, who died in action in the Battle of Arras in 1917 after enlisting at the age of 39 – far too old to have had to fight – is played by Pip Carter as prickly, petulant and with an alarmingly misogynistic streak. He tramples over the feelings of his adoring wife Helen and displays an unattractive physical cowardice when ambushed by an angry gamekeeper on one of his long country rambles. 

He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows, though, brings a prickling sense of horror, as Michael Attenborough’s production lends a disturbing dimension to Shakespeare’s bleak tragedy.

Plays about media folk and creatives, such as Joe Penhall’s Dumb Show and Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man, are not uncommon in British theatre. They usually have recognisable middle-class settings, recognisable middle-class characters, and a couple of handfuls of punchy one-liners. The writing and acting usually veers from soap-opera parody to perceptive analysis of the way we are defined by our media-fuelled obsessions. So where on this scale of quality is writer, director and actor Matthew Dunster’s latest play?