Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife.

Birdcage Walk in Bristol really exists. It runs under an arched canopy of branches though a long-disused graveyard in Clifton. At this eerie spot, all that remains of the blitzed church of St Andrew’s, rosebay willowherb grows waist-high but “no one lays flowers here; no one mourns”.

Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape.

In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “tensile strength” of materials. You can treat the Hadley short story as that sort of device in itself. Precision engineered and finely calibrated, it stress-tests not only marriages and affairs but memories, desires, even identities, with episodes of crisis and discovery that reveal each fault-line or fracture.

Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. 

Lesley Manville’s performance as Mary, the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O’Neill’s dark masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by Richard Eyre, is breathtaking, from the moment she first steps on stage until her last sombre soliloquy. The role of a woman prone to hysteria and self-deception invites over-acting, not least when the author has given her torrents of dope-driven lines, as well as placed her in desperately solipsistic isolation.

Alan Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father dies, is beset with the angst that goes with the territory of late adolescence. The production presents, on one level, a tragic coming of age drama, one in which the young heroes are consumed by madness and caught in the political and sexual machinations of their elders.

Mark Bruce did very well with his last dance theatre production Dracula, but this time around he has reached a little too far. The Odyssey is a great text, but with the twists and turns of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, burdened with the karmic debt of multiple crimes against the gods committed during the Trojan War, Homer’s epic is an unwieldy beast: it’s at times as if Bruce had himself succumbed to the avalanche of challenges the tired and traumatised warrior has to face on his way home.

Tricky navigates a kind of penumbra, a fertile and ever-renewing source of inspiration in which his mixed-race, gender-fluid self can re-invent itself periodically, while staying true to his roots and his unique self-taught take on the world of electronics and beats.

Christmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of authority and the playful representation of evil. There is always a danger when a tradition that thrives on predictable tropes is re-invented, but Sally Cookson, after her very successful productions of Peter Pan and Treasure Island, has once again made something immensely original and new, while paying homage to this particularly British seasonal entertainment.