If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding Filter's interest in the synergy between technology and text with a subset of Shakespeareans who have been wandering the Forest of Arden on and off for the past two years, Silence plunges its expert ensemble into the forest of metal that makes up one aspect of Jon Bausor's set. Will the result be as you like it?

Puppetry has come a long way in this country. Once considered the domain of children’s theatre only, you’ll now be hard pushed to find a classical production where puppets are not used in some way. For this sea change we have to thank, amongst others, a couple of Canadian geniuses, Ronnie Birkett and Robert Lepage, and - almost single-handedly carrying the torch for puppetry as a grown-up form to be taken seriously in this country - John and Lyndie Wright, founders of the Little Angel Theatre, Islington. With both celebrating their half-centuries this year, Little Angel and the Royal Shakespeare Company have joined forces once again to produce a magical version of Shakespeare’s final play.

Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the reason, memorable past explorations of this subject, from the Soviet side of the space race, include Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon and David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. Now Rona Munro, whose new play opened last night, once again boldly goes deep into the history behind the first man in space.

My latest play, Little Eagles, marks the 50th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit around the Earth. Gagarin’s place in history is, quite rightly, assured but little is known about Sergei Korolyov, a brilliant engineer and the chief designer of the Soviet space programme. Koroloyov may not have won the race to put a man on the moon, but he was responsible for a series of extraordinary firsts in the space race, including the first human in space. Little Eagles is his story.

A disproportionate number of column inches seem to have been devoted to James Purefoy’s matinee-idol looks, his ability to carry off a pair of breeches and the amount of time he appears on television naked. However, while he has admittedly spent much of his career swaggering around in period costume - Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, the recently released Ironclad - he has also played, among many other things, a psychopathic rapist, a stalker and the fraudster Darius Guppy.

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.

Even at the time it seemed a little strange: the visionary Kathryn Hunter as an oddball Cleopatra in a production that hardly seemed up to the mark either of her performing standards or of her own fabulous Shakespeare staging, a Pericles which was one of the two best things I've ever seen at the Globe.

“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.