The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.

The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.

What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.

We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. And, sure enough, the latest new play at the ever-enterprising Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s Jess and Joe Forever, is small and short. But it is also a hugely enjoyable romcom.

Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda graduated from a rehearsed reading last season to a full-blown production. Director Andy Jordan does what he can with this historical mishmash, but there’s no disguising the fundamental flaws in the play’s construction.

She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Now Kathryn Hunter spellbinds in a very Shakespearean downfall drama about the court of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie – but this time the Elect of God doesn’t actually appear in person, not literally at any rate, and the triumph is shared by everybody involved, lighting and soundscape designers included.

Ever since Lucy Prebble’s hit masterpiece, Enron, opened our eyes to the possibilities of staging plays about global finance in a thrillingly theatrical way, the hunt has been on for another story that can be as informative and as well staged. Step forward Beth Steel, whose Wonderland, her previous play at this address, looked at Yorkshire miners in the 1980s Miners Strike. Now she travels across the pond in the late 1970s, to look at the similarly arcane activities of New York bankers.

Alice Birch is one of the most exciting playwrights to have arrived in the past five years. This restaging of the brilliantly titled Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. – which was first put on as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Midsummer Mischief festival in June 2014 – demonstrates not only the power of her theatrical imagination, but also her enormous technical skill and sense of emotional truth. In the original playtext, she stresses that “this play should not be well behaved”, which sounds like an incitement to messiness.

For the final show in his year-long stay at this West End address, Kenneth Branagh has chosen to revive and star in John Osborne’s 1957 play. By doing so, he finds himself once again treading in the footsteps of Sir Laurence Olivier, who originally created the role. It’s not the first time he’s shadowed the legendary actor. In 1989, he played Henry V on film, and then also the great man himself (in the 2011 film Marilyn and Me).

Do you carry a small part of the Congo every day on your person? Probably. Your mobile phone will contain coltan, aka columbite tantalum, which is used to make your electronics work better. And this is mined in the Congo. The trouble is that fluctuating prices for this mineral, as well as competition for such resources, encourages conflict between militia groups, which is one reason for the constant wars in this region of Africa. Another reason is the legacy of colonialism. Another reason is unfettered masculinity. And so it goes on.