When Shakespeare visits the bearpit of the West End, it is usually in the company of a big name: Judi Dench, Sheridan Smith, Martin Freeman. This Christmas the bard enters the Theatre Royal, Haymarket without any such support. And there is a further hurdle to clear: Love’s Labour’s Lost is barely ever been seen outside the subsidised sector. It forms part of a pair which audiences might take a moment to get their head around: Much Ado About Nothing is presented as its Shakespearean twin called Love’s Labour’s Won.

Antonia Bird died in 2013 at the age of 62. The last television drama with her name on it was the first series of The Village, but the career which is celebrated in the BBC Four documentary Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood were from a golden age of single drama. You always knew you were watching a film by Bird. She made a name with single-issue films with single-syllable titles.

In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after two years on the road playing to audiences from every country on the planet. He acknowledged his predecessor Mark Rylance, who waved a hat from the throng of groundlings, and then pointed up to the circle where his successor Emma Rice was greeted with gales of welcoming applause.

“A huge lizard in sunglasses” was Robin Askwith’s impression of Pier Paolo Pasolini on first meeting the Italian director.

This is a reissue, but an important one, especially considering that the film industry’s gender inequalities are as entrenched as ever. Kay Mander’s cinematic career began in the mid 1930s when she became a publicist for Alexander Korda. She joined the Shell Film Unit in 1940 as a production assistant, directing her first documentary in 1941. It’s included here: How to File is a still watchable seven-minute training film aimed at metalwork apprentices.

It’s not easy to see the pattern in Roger Michell’s career. More than most British directors, he has zigzagged between the stage and the screen. He was the one who first rehearsed such contemporary classics as Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange towards their premieres, he has regularly staged the works of Pinter, and yet he is also the director of Notting Hill.

Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. Directed with clarity and simplicity, Nick Payne’s romantic two-hander with multiple narratives has travelled from the Royal Court via the West End to New York, before touring the UK and heading back to London this week. Longhurst may need to clone himself in order to be in two places at once: his production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number is also opening at the Young Vic.

What happened to Harry Lime during the war that he slid into iniquity, or was he always a swine? What cracked in him so badly that he sold diluted penicillin that gave children meningitis? What rat-like instincts of survival prompted him to betray his Czech lover so that the Russians would evict her from Austria? And why did he summon the hapless Holly Martins from America to join his racket? Was it that he could rely on Holly to be dazzled and dominated by him, as he must have been 20 years before at school?

In a quirk of film scheduling, The Duke of Burgundy was out in cinemas the week after Fifty Shades of Grey. While it’s doubtful there will have been much audience overlap, the bigger beast gobbled up every single one of the S&M column inches that season. Now out on DVD, Peter Strickland’s infinitely more nuanced portrait of sub-dom co-dependency - and the concept of the safe word - has a clearer claim on all our attention.

It's surely among the most grotesque factoids in the history of Hollywood that despite being nominated for 10 Oscars, American Hustle won a grand total of none. Its big mistakes were presumably being too entertaining and failing to concern itself with a historic social issue. My own theory is that the cast was just too good - the flick boasted five potential gong-winners, and perhaps it was beyond the capabilities of the Academy to choose wisely between them.