In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni.

“I’m black – I need to find out how black people live.” So reasoned Kiri, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by her social services case worker. She was on the way from her prospective adopters, a white middle-class couple who already had a teenage son, to pay a first unsupervised visit to her Nigerian-born grandparents. Kiri (Felicia Mukasa, pictured below) was mature beyond her years, open-minded and well-spoken, while her case worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire) brimmed with mumsy good cheer and sensible advice.

One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.

Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia.

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.