Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70^th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.

Not even a cameo by Tamsin Greig can redeem this painful adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. For an hour and a half it screams with anguish, verging at times on the parodic. The production is a puzzle. Caroline Bird has updated the language, stripping the original of much of its poetry and adding expletives.

It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.

Like a post-Soviet Oedipal X-Factor, the Belarus Free Theatre on Friday night gave one of the greatest productions of King Lear London has ever seen. Forget our local Lears, with naked theatrical knights and casts in emotional straitjackets: this was as cruel, as beautiful, as you could want. It shook the Globe from the yard to the rafters.

Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.

The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”.

How far would you go, if you were utterly in love? Till death you do part? Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 ballet Romeo and Juliet remains a magnet for audiences and for performers all playing that ritual game with their own feelings. Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares are a married couple, and brought to their single performance (unaccountably) in this new run of Covent Garden’s timeless attraction an infusion of pounding blood and sensual compatibility.

First come the strip-lit corridors, the stained breeze blocks, the locked doors; later there are restraints, drugs, needles. The time is out of joint, and we are all imprisoned in a nightmare of confusion, paranoia, guilt and despair. Who are the mad? Who the sane? In Ian Rickson’s thrilling production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, it’s often frighteningly unclear.

This is not exactly Edward II the musical. There’s no singing, but music plays a leading role. It is the food of love of the sort that dared not speak its name – and there is excess of it for my taste. The idiom is jazz of the edgy sort fashionable in Paris in the 1950s, reflecting pretty boy Piers Gaveston’s exile there, where he has been banished by Edward I for getting too close to his wayward son.

On 5 August last year, a cave-in at Chile's 121-year-old San José copper mine left 33 workers trapped more than 2,000ft underground. Their subterranean ordeal would last 69 days, but this documentary concerned itself with the first 17 of those, the period during which the miners had no contact with anybody on the surface and had no way of knowing if they'd be rescued.