It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?

You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “hideously white” and, despite the sterling work of groups such as Yellow Earth theatre company, there have been several casting controversies where white actors have played Chinese and East Asian characters.

Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital takes to Simon Godwin's characteristically acute, alert production with the palpable affection that was afforded the staging closer to home one recent evening.

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: A Reimagining – it’s not a title that trips off the tongue. Nor one, frankly, that inspires much excitement, with its clunky functionality and on-trend buzzword. But set that aside and buy a ticket immediately, because Gyre & Gimble have made magic with their latest show.

Hot on the heels of International Women’s Day come three monologues written, directed and produced by women showing at Hoxton Hall. It’s kind of a treat, and kind of not.

In 1982 Antony Sher played the Fool to Michael Gambon’s King in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. Shortly after, he came back to Stratford to play Richard III, for which he won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor.

Good programming is an art, and Paul Miller – artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre – is clearly on a continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres. And he loves to take risks.

It would be so easy to make fun of the 1945 Noel Coward/ David Lean film in which, famously, nothing happens between two guilt-ridden married lovers. That oh-so-British middle class restraint, those flet, perfectly enunciated vowels, the overwhelming romantic rush of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 – isn’t it all a bit OTT, just crying out for a French-and-Saunders-style send-up?

This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession.

Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth.