London’s latest new theatre opens with an appropriately otherworldly Halloween offering: American composer Dave Malloy’s teeming 2014 song cycle, which played at the Edinburgh Festival in 2016.

Even the most ardent Bardophile has to admit that most of the time the Fool doesn’t shine in a Shakespeare production. Lamentable wordplay combined with philosophy limper than a dead capon means that with a few honourable exceptions, his interludes feel nasty, a tad brutish, and just not short enough.

Memory involves places, people, things and words, especially words. This abstract proposition is given knotty life in Welsh playwright Ed Thomas's extraordinary new play, On Bear Ridge, which comes to the Royal Court after opening at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff last month.

Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else.

Time has been not just kind but even crucial to Little Baby Jesus, the 2011 play from the multi-hyphenate talent Arinzé Kene, who since then has gone on become a major name on and offstage: the West End transfer of his self-penned Misty brought him dual Olivier nominations earlier this year as writer and actor, and he segued from that to playing the volatile son Biff in Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic.

Even the mighty Almeida is allowed the occasional dud and it’s sure as hell got one at the moment with Vassa. Maxim Gorky’s 1910 play (rewritten in 1935) about a matriarch in extremis some years back proved a stonking West End star vehicle for Sheila Hancock. It offers a chance to go hell-for-leather that should set the pulse racing.

Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic.

At a point in history where – yet again – a few misplaced words from English politicians could wreak havoc with Irish lives, this is a welcome revival of Ian Rickson’s stunning production which first played here to rapturous reviews last year.

Tom Morris’s production of Cyrano starts with a procession of nuns, some of them bearded, chanting verses from the medieval mystic Hildegarde of Bingen. In this original and lively version of Edmond Rostand’s late 19^th century classic, Morris has played fast and loose with the original text, translated here and brought up to date by the poet and theatre maker Peter Oswald.

Clean Break, the theatre company that specialises in working with women in the criminal justice system, is doing a lot of celebrating. It's the 40th anniversary of this unique female organisation and already this year they have put on a variety of shows, from Chloe Moss's Sweatbox to the devised piece Inside Bitch.