N F Simpson is a legendary absurdist playwright of 1950s and 1960s vintage. But while his 1957 debut, A Resounding Tinkle, got a revival some three years ago at the Donmar, he was widely believed to have given up writing more than 30 years ago. After all, he has a back catalogue of comic classics, and he celebrated his 91st birthday in January this year! But, true to form, the veteran humorist has surprised us once more. Last night, the Jermyn Street Theatre, a fringe venue a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus, premiered his brand new play.

The American Dream is a great subject for theatre. Not only is it a powerful myth that animates millions, but it is also vulnerable to being subverted by generations of playwrights. Like an aged boxer, it is liable to being floored by a well-aimed punch. In Bruce Norris’s new play, which premiered in New York earlier this year and opened in London last night, comedy is the kick that topples the great giant of the American Dream.

Next up in our summer reading series is dramatist Patrick Marber whose shrewd, sometimes excoriating, but always riveting observations of the human condition in plays such as Closer always manage to pull off that rare trick of appealing to critics and audiences alike.

What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic, dazzlingly directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold and which opened last night, the image of a foetus crying out in the womb seems perfectly reasonable. It’s that kind of show; fuelled by a wildly imaginative vision, when it ignites it burns like phosphorous. And, believe me, that changes your perceptions.

Dominic Dromgoole (b. Oct.1963) had directed professionally precisely one Shakespeare play - Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company, with a then little-known Matt Lucas as Thersites - when he was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, the Thames-side playhouse that has defied nay-sayers to become a London theatrical fixture since opening to the public in 1997. Could the amiably scruffy one-time leader of west London's tiny Bush, a space given over exclusively to new work, gather in the groundlings, and more, across a landscape inevitably defined by the Bard, notwithstanding the presence of original writing from Howard Brenton, Che Walker, or, still to come, Nell Leyshon? As Dromgoole's fifth season gathers pace with the opening 24 May of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt, it made sense to check in with Dromgoole early in his own rehearsals for Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, with Roger Allam as Falstaff and Jamie Parker as Hal.