Design For Living is one of Noël Coward’s less performed plays but it fair crackles with bons mots - you know you’re in good hands when delightfully old-fashioned words like “horrid”, “bloody”, “cheap” and “vulgar” are tossed around with, well, gay abandon. What a shame, then, that Anthony Page’s production, while wonderfully easy on the eye and despite some spirited performances from its three leads, doesn’t quite catch fire.

Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts?

Ten years after Justin Fashanu - not only the first openly gay footballer, but the first black player to command a £1 million transfer fee - committed suicide in a lock-up garage in the East End, his former agent, Eric Hall, breezily informed the BBC that football was “not a world that attracts gay people". Has anyone told Elton John, Watford FC’s most famous fan? Yet however implausible Hall’s comment may seem, the evidence is stacked solidly in his favour: no other professional footballer apart from Fashanu has ever come out.

This month's most interesting new music CDs according to theartsdesk music team includes a dark take on sex and consumerism by The-Dream, which is CD of the Month, "morally ambiguous" South London gangsta rap from Giggs, disco pop from Sia, Scissor Sisters and Robyn, "indietronica" from Grasscut and Tobacco, heritage rock from Tom Petty, immaculate jazz from David Weiss and a compilation of old Colombian dance music. Stinker of the Month is Eminem who is cordially advised to take up religion, get fat or do charity work. Reviewers this month are Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Bruce Dessau, Howard Male, Adam Sweeting, Russ Coffey, Marcus O'Dair and Peter Culshaw.

Religion, and a sense of the revival of belief, is such an important part of everyday life in the wider population that it is one of the stranger facts about contemporary theatre that so few plays tackle this subject. In fact, the last new British play to do this at the National was David Hare’s Racing Demon in 1990. Now, 20 years later, the same Cottesloe theatre space bears witness to a new play, which opened last night, about the same subject.

Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.

Above the Stag, an unpromising-looking, ominously shuttered gay pub in the ungainly heart of Victoria, a little miracle has been taking place. Word of mouth quickly sold out an intelligent adaptation of E M Forster's great coming-out novel Maurice, so the run has been extended until this Saturday. At the time of writing there were a few seats left for the final performance; as for a transfer, who knows?

Friends bought tickets for this one, so I came to it fearing all that's bad about pub theatre (and from some I've seen, it couldn't be much worse). How wrong I was. Roger Parsley and Andy Graham have selected nearly all of Forster's most significant one-to-ones. The clarity of his prose keeps datedness or sentimentality at bay, and it's much assisted by Tim McArthur's sure-footed direction as well as some first-class acting from Adam Lilley's ambivalent hero - excellent in conflict with poor sister Ada (Persia Lawson) - and from Jonathan Hansler in two consummate cameos. Unless you're fixated on the image of Rupert Graves's gamekeeper in the cagier Merchant-Ivory film - I'm not - then Stevie Raine's Alec is all that could be desired. Further details from Above the Stag Theatre's website.

Regular punters at the King’s Head are familiar with cheerily naked gay romps, they are quite a speciality in this much favoured North London haunt, possibly enhanced by the intimate dimensions of the theatre itself. In Martin Lewton's Lord Arthur's Bed the stark lighting and very basic set – a double bed and a dining chair – further highlight the sensation of almost prurient proximity, something almost immediately addressed by Ruaraidh Murray’s very in-yer-face Jim, who tells the audience that “you are our webcam”.