As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Or Ross Noble ambling into frame as a socialist tramp, shortly to be throttled and thrown from a moving train?

A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month.

It’s a strange fact that very few plays look at the subject of contemporary British royalty. The past yes, but today very seldom. A notable exception is 1990s playwright Sarah Kane’s visceral account of a fictional royal family in her 1996 play, Phaedra’s Love, a spirited revival of which opened last night at the Arcola Theatre. As you’d expect from this playwright, it is a gruelling evening of joyless sex and horrific violence. But it is also bleakly funny.

Imaginative plays that explore the expanses of inner space are all the rage at the Soho Theatre this summer. First there was a superb revival of Anthony Neilson’s Realism, which puts on stage the thoughts of one man during a solitary Saturday, then there was Lou Ramsden’s Hundreds and Thousands, which used a horror-film aesthetic to explore female longing. Now Mongrel Island, which opened last night, looks at the thoughts and emotions of one woman who has a boring office job.

Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East.

Situation comedy relies on strong brands, and some ideas just run and run. Yes, Prime Minister is the stage version of the long-running 1980s BBC television shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which memorably starred Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington. First seen at Chichester last year, the play now returns, with a new cast, for a second West End season. But how does this trusty old brand stand up to the stresses and strains of current political life?

John Gay’s 1728 satirical drama was the first ballad opera. The vernacular work not only cocked a snook at the Italian operas that were so in vogue in 18th-century London, but it also lampooned Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole and the British love for scoundrels. It was an instant, huge hit; as a witticism of the time had it, The Beggar’s Opera made Rich gay, and Gay rich.

They say that moving home is always traumatic. So the Bush Theatre in west London must be feeling a wee bit fragile because it has recently upped sticks and taken up residence in the Old Shepherds Bush Library building just around the corner from its historic but rather leaky former home. Yet it’s typical of this spunky venue that it celebrates the first stages of the move with not only a trilogy of short plays, but also with an invitation to the audience to comment on its new space.

It's not often in classic comedy that you cry with laughter at the opening gags, and even rarer that the final scene of perfectly orchestrated ensemble acting actually crowns the work. More than two decades on from his groundbreaking Old Vic production of Ostrovsky's Too Clever By Half, director of genius Richard Jones is still finding the right mugs and pushing the boundaries of edgy satire.

Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.