Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words that can express anything as eloquently as his music did – about life and death, pain and transcendence, wretchedness or rapture at the simplest aspects of existence. So much of what he represented was distilled into that music – and what we are left with biographically is the workaholism, the curmudgeonliness, the rows with figures of authority.

Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real horrors. Clearly they’re willing to try again with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, because its run has just been extended. The vanishings familiar to Butterworth’s wife Laura Donnelly, whose uncle was among the disappeared, still resonate, as a programme article by Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, reinforces.

Screen stardom is generally anointed at the box office so it's a very real delight to find the fast-rising Jonathan Bailey taking time out from his ascendant celluloid career to return to his stage roots in Richard II.

The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs.

“Who’d be a woman?... Who in their right mind would choose all that?” The question comes towards the end of a conversation where two former lovers are comparing notes on their tumultuous recent past.

One of them, Jo, has just had a baby. The other, Harry, has taken hormones to transition from being a man to being a woman. In answer to the question, Harry replies, “No-one does though, do they? No-one chooses… Some of us just come the long way round.”

Over the last few months, celebrity-driven West End productions have suffered some inglorious crashes. So there was a certain degree of trepidation at the opening night for this star vehicle for Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell. For five minutes, it must be confessed, this reviewer was worried; it seemed so over-miked, so hyper, so, well PINK. But between the diamond-sharp banter and the endorphin fizz, something started to happen, and suddenly it erupted into one of the best parties in town.

The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.

Our humanity is defined not only by our use of language, but also by our sense of the spiritual. Whether you are a believer or not, it’s hard to deny the attractions of religion for billions around the world. Sounds portentous? Yeah. Okay, you’re now in the zone for Beau Willimon’s new play East Is South, currently at the Hampstead Theatre, a work which suggests that the digital world can also be mystical place. 

Since when has new writing become so passionless? Mike Bartlett is one of the country’s premiere playwrights and his new play, Unicorn, is about radical sexuality and desire. It’s already made a big splash by being put straight on in the West End, yet the experience of watching it feels like a real turn off. It’s a masterclass of bad writing and unemotional acting.

I always advocate in favour of more sci-fi plays, and over the past decade there have been a gratifying number of them. But one essential element of any futuristic fantasy must be its power to convince. And it is precisely this that is missing from Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman’s More Life, currently in the studio space of the Royal Court.