There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation. Writers Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, co-founders of Belarus Free Theatre, have pulled off an astonishing coup: their feast for the senses, directed by Khalezin, tells horrific stories without melodrama, without overstatement or buckets of blood - and it is all the stronger for its brilliant mix of matter-of-factness and lyricism.

Everything seems so free and easy, so do-as-you-darn-well-pleasey, in the Stockmanns’ fjord-view model home. Cheery friends in bright 1970s clothes drop in to chew the social cud as well as Mrs S’s cooking; only her medical-officer husband’s mayoral brother jars, and surely he’s too daft to be taken seriously. So when the good doctor finds irrefutable proof that the waters of the town’s new spa are poisoned, the weight of liberal opinion will surely back him up and all must be well, right?

"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to the lowest reaches of human experience.

Unsurprisingly, it was an ambition long held and within the grasp of the actor Edward Petherbridge to play Lear, widely regarded as the summit of a classical thespian's career, when, in New Zealand to take on the part in 2007, he was struck down by not one but two strokes.

Updating Chekhov is nothing new, despite the preliminary flurries about this production. Yet the singular directorial take can only highlight the master’s modernity in the bigger issues. If Australian iconoclast Benedict Andrews had continued as he seems to begin, with a Stanislavsky-like realism for today, passing anachronisms like the optimism for a better life in centuries to come, the idleness of a servanted household and a shockingly abrupt duel might jar.

The front door of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it’s a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting through the catatonic tranquility of domestic order, originally scandalised 19^th-century Norwegian society, but with scandal now rather harder to come by, Ibsen’s play has acquired a quieter, but infinitely more pervasive impact.

Peter Brook is probably at his happiest in Africa. Through his Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, he has long had access to gifted Francophone black African actors. They’ve always been a significant contingent of his troupe there, which has also included Maghrebis, Americans, Japanese, Germans, French and even, sometimes, Britons. Brook’s first focus of attention was West Africa, then South: in 1973 he was blown away at the Royal Court by township actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and set out on a project to inhabit and stage the black African soul which has lasted four decades.

The Young Vic together with American Repertory Theater, Boston have taken on a huge challenge in staging the lengthy yet gripping memoir by Chinese writer Jung Chang that became an instant success when first published in 1991. Wild Swans was one of the first accounts of mainland China to be introduced to the West and as such it paved the way for other stories to be told from China.

In 1888, the extremely weird Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, the radical lefty son of a shipping merchant and a housemaid, wrote a play called Miss Julie about the conflict between the classes, between love and lust, between obedience and servitude, and between all the possible variations on these knotty and tortu(r)ous themes.

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is the misleading, jokey title of a play about Shakespeare in his ignoble last years, unable to write further, isolated from his beloved London, and hemmed in by local politics. Shakespeare is invited to become a town councillor! To take sides in a dispute about land enclosures! It’s a cracking re-visioning of the genius whom films and myth have preserved in the aspic of lusty, piratic eloquence.

The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”.