Could an epic cinematic masterpiece be turned successfully into a three-act play? Confession first: Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander is my No. 1 film.

The practice of mining the rich seam of popular movies to turn them into stage plays or musicals seemingly never grows tired in theatreland. And sometimes it produces a gem but all too often it’s just a cynical ploy to attract ticket sales by piggy-backing on fond memories of a beloved film. It’s unfair to accuse this stage adaptation of Hal Ashby’s cult movie, Harold and Maude, of cynicism; the efforts of all involved are patently sincere, but sadly it just doesn’t work.

Whatever the weather, this week is Frozen. On Broadway, the Disney musical of that name begins previews, but let’s let that go. In the West End, our Frozen has no Elsa, no Anna and no glittery gowns. Although it does have plenty of ice imagery. No, our Frozen is a much darker story; it’s a revival of Bryony Lavery’s 1998 award-winning play about a child killer – definitely no singing, no dancing, no hummable tunes.

Monologues are very much the flavour of the start of this theatrical year. At the Royal Court, we have Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s brilliant Girls & Boys, coming hot on the tottering heels of Anoushka Warden’s My Mum’s a Twat, while at the Bush a season of solo plays is currently disturbing psyches with Monica Dolan’s B*easts.

This is Carey Mulligan week. She appears, improbably enough, as a hard-nosed cop in David Hare’s BBC thriller Collateral, as well as onstage at the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square (she’s much better live than on film).

Peter Gill has been a quiet if invaluable mainstay of the Donmar over time. But the Welsh playwright-director has rarely been better served than by this emotional stealth bomb of a revival of his 2002 Royal Court play, The York Realist, presented here as a co-production with the Sheffield Crucible, where it will transfer following the London run.

If the Small Faces weren’t quite The Beatles or the Stones, they were one of the classic British bands of their era, and their recordings are treasured by ancient Mods, Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher and even discerning representatives of today’s youth.

Playwright Alan Ayckbourn basically comes in two flavours: suburban comedies of embarrassment and sci-fi fantasies. His latest, The Divide, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival last year in a two-part six-hour version, has been now been trimmed down to a single very long evening for its short stay at the Old Vic in London.

First the goats, and now the sheep – has this venue become an urban farm? Rural life, which was once so central to our English pastoral culture, is now largely absent from metropolitan stages. And from our culture. Apart from The Archers or the village gothic of shows like The League of Gentlemen, the countryside has become a lost world, a blank space on which any playwright can project their imaginary stories.

Eugene O’Neill’s 1945 play Long Day’s Journey Into Night is famously a portrayal of the hellish damage that a sick person can wreak on their family, closely based on his own family. Mary and James Tyrone are images of his own parents, down to details like the father’s compromised acting career, the mother’s post-natal suffering from her last childbirth and subsequent addiction to morphine, and of course the emotional havoc for the small sons when they discover their mother’s affliction.