“Tonight there’s no one else in the world – just us together,” announced Josh Homme halfway through the night. And it felt so. But it didn't seem like we were in the Roundhouse. More like we were sitting amid the heat haze of California’s Palm Desert, on a two-hour psychedelic trip, and the Queens of the Stone Age front man was our personal shaman. Sometimes it was euphoric, and other times it was dizzying. And when the volume was cranked really high it was like the top of the Roundhouse might blow off.

They’re a fun band with some cracking tunes and they provided a vibrant night’s music last night at the Roundhouse, but where on earth did the idea come from that Noah and the Whale are a folk band? On this evidence, they’re about as folkie as Motörhead. Granted, they have a violinist in their line-up, but this is really no signifier of folkiness. In fact, the musician who sprang to mind most frequently during this pacy, compact show was Bruce Springsteen, especially on the material from the band’s recent Last Night on Earth album, with its heroic chord changes, its loose scansion and its tales of driving and escape from suburbia.

Bouncy: if there is one word that sums up this hot young Northern Irish band, that would be the one; there is a Tiggerish enthusiasm to their music that encourages bouncing, clapping, arm-waving and generally having a good time, which is exactly what happened at last night's gig: a festive atmosphere prevailed, Two Door Cinema Club played a short, sharp set that lasted for little more than an hour, and they sent the crowd out into the early spring night buzzing.

Beards, beards, beards: at the Roundhouse, they seemed to be everywhere, sprouting from the chins of hundreds of chaps in the audience. Perhaps, though, I was just looking out for them, what with the luxuriant growth on the face of the man they had all come to see: Iron & Wine, the artist otherwise known as Sam Beam, singer, songwriter and former film studies professor from the American south-east.

At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

“Now go we in content. To liberty and not to banishment.” A touchstone to productions of As You Like It, Celia’s wishful recasting of the Forest of Arden can rarely pass unchallenged by directors. In 2009 we saw Michael Boyd’s RSC production go head to head with Thea Sharrock’s unexpected and beguilingly sunny interpretation at the Globe – a contest in which Sharrock proved a comfortable victor. Returning once again with his conventionally darker-hued take on Shakespeare’s comedy, the question was always going to be whether Boyd could grasp the authority that so slimly eluded him last time.

Problematic in performance in a way that the “problem plays” simply aren’t, Shakespeare’s Roman plays remain some of his hardest to stage satisfactorily. Updated versions too often turn into Magritte-esque fantasies of identikit, suited politicos, while the togas of more traditional approaches can feel absurd, unavoidably laden with satiric or Hollywood associations.

The Royal Shakespeare Company celebrates its 50th birthday season with the grand reopening of its transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre at a cost of £112.8 million. The temporary Courtyard Theatre folds curtains on the sold-out smash hit that is Matilda, awaiting one last flourish in the Olympics Shakespeare Festival next year before its intended demolition. New productions of Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet inaugurate the revamped RST, while London operations transfer from the Roundhouse to Hampstead Theatre for the premieres of three new plays. The season is capped with a six-week summer residency in New York. Full season listings below.

A night when a fresh fall of snow was fluttering from the heavens could hardly have felt more fitting for the opening of this Shakespearean romance – particularly since David Farr’s production for the RSC, first seen in Stratford in 2009, so felicitously counters fire with ice. Cruelty and rage, the willful closing off of the heart, the reawakening of hope and the resurrection of enduring love: passion both kills and sustains in the worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia; and if the staging sometimes seems slightly ponderous, it delivers moments of arresting intensity.

For quirky authority in Shakespeare, Kathryn Hunter is surely up there with Mark Rylance. Her production of Pericles was one of the two best things I’ve seen at the Globe – Rylance in Twelfth Night being the other - her characterisations of Lear and Richard III as compelling as any. Hunter plays Cleopatra as a regal, shrewd eastern cousin of Katherina and Beatrice, making the case for a very human prose which would no doubt work better if the production around which she snakes and sharptongues found a little more poetry in other quarters.