Two countries; two histories. Being black in the US; being black in the UK. Compare and contrast. Which is exactly what debbie tucker green’s amazingly ambitious new epic, which straddles centuries and continents, succeeds in doing. Taking a forensic look at what it means to be at the sharp end when you are Black British or African American, the show has a thrillingly unexpected theatre form and is written in green’s distinctive style of reiterative and repetitive punchy dialogues, which here are both emotionally passionate and imaginatively modernistic.

Adultery seldom looks less adult than in the form of the mild-life crisis – that much-satirised condition in which desire is eclipsed by delusion, wisdom by foolishness, and sensible coats by leather jackets.

Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those.

The Royal Court Theatre has long been a leader in new British drama writing. Thanks to Elyse Dodgson, who has died aged 73, it has built up an international programme like few others in the arts, anywhere. At the theatre, Elyse headed up readings, workshops (in London and abroad), exchanges and writers’ residencies that might have suggested a team of 15 or so but her department was modest in size.

Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap.

It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre — is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright.

It has been said before: Macbeth's reputation for bad luck has more to do with the difficulty of bringing off a successful production than the supernatural elements in the play.

"What could possibly go wrong?" The question ends the first act of Wise Children, the debut venture from the new company birthed by a director, Emma Rice, who must have asked herself precisely that query at many points in recent years.

This blisteringly intense evening at Trafalgar Studios begins with two strangers in an Amsterdam hotel bedroom and – through a series of personal revelations – ends up spanning continents. With just 80 minutes and two actors, Ken Urban’s simultaneously warmly funny and deeply moving play manages to achieve an impact that some dramas fail to in three hours with ten times the cast.

The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21^st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be.