“This audience is very diverse, isn’t it?” joked one of the audience members at Fucking Men at Waterloo East Theatre, a reworking of Tony-winning writer Joe DiPietro’s seminal 2008 play (itself a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written in 1897).

The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths, funerals and grief. 

For a masterclass in expansive adaptation, one could do worse than turn to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, based on American author Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same title. Proulx’s restrained but searing tale of the queer romance between two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming generated in Lee's 2005 film a tragedy of deep interiority and complex emotion.

The eponymous garment in The Blue Caftan is a thing of beauty meticulously stitched and embroidered by Halim (Saleh Bakri), a maalem or master tailor, in one of Morocco’s oldest medinas. His craftmanship, with its focus on intricate details and on colour, is reflected in writer-director Maryam Touzani’s filmmaking, which is equally time-weighted and precise.

Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.

If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late twenties and with a background in electronic production, is a post-modern assault, garish and unapologetic, part satire (possibly), part avant-punk noisiness, and part wilfully infantile and ridiculous.

Partially banned in Pakistan, Saim Sadiq’s debut uses a young man’s affair with a trans woman to reveal the sadness and brutality of the nation’s patriarchal norms. It’s also a deeply sympathetic character study written from under the country’s skin, which Sadiq calls “a heartbroken love letter to my homeland”.

With the total loss of its Arts Council funding, Hampstead Theatre’s future as a specialist new writing venue is in doubt. But before anything drastically changes, the playwrights and plays developed by Roxanna Silbert, who was edged out as artistic director in December last year, are still coming through.

Ever been to a queer club? You know, drag cabaret night at Madame Jojo’s, or the Black Cap or Her Upstairs. No? Well, not to worry – the Royal Court’s latest provides a fabulously extravagant simulation of the experience with its staging of Sound of the Underground, a play written by Travis Alabanza – whose classic Burgerz is coming to the Purcell Room in March – and directed by his co-creator Debbie Hannan.

The scene is set onstage in the first minutes. And it remains a stage throughout this harmonious production. The action takes place in a severe court and a more liberal forest, but really the setting is always a place of imagination, a theatre. Jaques' most anthologised speech, "All the world's a stage ... " is its keynote: all the actors are players, in both senses of the word.