Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.

Maybe because we are aware now of too many cases of a paranoid schizophrenic suddenly unleashing violence on an innocent stranger, the teenager under treatment in Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play, who has blinded six horses, is no longer a character we feel that conflicted about.

Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape had its world premiere in 1958, with Patrick Magee, at the Royal Court.

This blistering account of Brecht’s classic – which he wrote in a white heat of fury as news reached him of Hitler’s invasion of Poland – pitches us headlong into the cynicism and casual obscenity of war. Elle While’s uncompromising production is like a Mad Max cabaret at the end of time, a post-apocalyptic vision of a world corrupted by violence and greed. 

Are Oscar Wilde's plays comedies of manners or just mannered comedies? Can they be kept afloat for today's audiences if they stick more or less to the period setting (this one does; the Lyric Hammersmith version reviewed, also today, by Helen Hawkins, doesn't)? An Ideal Husband offers Wilde's richest dramatic pickings, its timeless tale of political and personal corruption laced with an artifice that gives way to reveal the jungle beasts beneath the sharp, barbed facades.

It’s safe to say Oscar Wilde enjoyed a good party, so it’s very likely he would give a big thumbs up to the Lyric’s An Ideal Husband, which director Nicholas La Barrie has souped up as an Afro-Caribbean comedy of manners, featuring added workouts on the dance floor.

It took me a long time to "get" the English Middle Class, though I don’t think I completely understand them even now. Sure drowning in accents and assumed privilege in a Russell Group university Law faculty was a helluva’n education (some of it even on the curriculum). But it was only up close and personal, in their natural habitat, that allowed me to start on deciphering their arcane codes.

This is a real humdinger of a Holmes, an intoxicating swirl through the mind of the fictional detective who has fascinated figures as diverse as Harrison Ford, Agatha Christie, and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Joel Horwood’s update takes Conan Doyle’s original The Sign of Four and liberally spices it with elements of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, the BBC’s Sherlock and an opium dream, to create a storyline that keeps you on your toes at the same time as it leads you through a labyrinth. 

After her lyrical tribute last year to a gone-too-soon young poet, Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl returns to the Hampstead Theatre with the same director, Blanche McIntyre, though this time in the main house and with larger forces. It’s a big-hearted, funny production.  

In the 70s, a science-inclined schoolboy like me was directed to young adult oriented biographies of Thomas Edison, of which there were many. They left out the more problematic aspects of his life, the dubious business practices and some of his more Victorian approaches to demonstrating the power of electricity (don’t Google it). Instead, they favoured the legend of a lone genius beating the odds to, quite literally, enlighten the world.