On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-affirming music made in the jaws of hell – the starving ghetto, the Nazi work camp – has been amply covered on page and screen. And one’s first thought during the opening 10 minutes of this production is, slightly guiltily: do I really have to look this horror in the face yet again?  

Storage space units are not a nice place to hang out. Chilly and quiet, vaguely depressing and horribly lit, they bring on a desire to leave almost immediately. The same impulse is palpable in Dante or Die’s site-specific show, Handle With Care, which attempts to inject a little life into a storage unit in Old Street, but falls horribly short. 

Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert.

Infertility affects one in six couples, but it’s still something of a taboo subject. Gareth Farr’s new play throws welcome light on the challenges of conception, and is accompanied by a Fertility Fest that brings together artists and medical experts to address the issues raised. If Farr’s drama occasionally feels like a case study for that discussion, with a few awkward sitcom beats tossed in, it’s still a searingly honest and genuinely affecting piece of work.

Thought Terence Rattigan was a playwright of the drawing room? Think again. A day after his defining work The Deep Blue Sea opened in an acclaimed revival at the National, Chichester Festival Theatre takes a lavish risk on this epic later work, which swaps dingy post-war London for the beating heat of the Arabian desert, and restrained middle-class passions for bloody revolution.

From being the Aunt Sally of contemporary British theatre, attacked by the angry young men in the 1950s and the new wave of social and political realists for three decades after that, playwright Terence Rattigan is now well and truly rehabilitated. For the past quarter of a century, both his major and his minor works have been regularly revived.

Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of Sondheim’s Into The Woods. That opera companies can and should stage Sondheim is vindicated by this production: the musical values are superb, my only niggle being that James Holmes’s excellent pit players are hidden offstage. The tricksy ensemble numbers are dazzling, with every word and melodic line thrillingly clear.

It has taken six years – and Michael Crawford – to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood’s poetic musicalisation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between to the West End stage. And before the tired old debate begins as to what it is – opera? musical? play with music? – let it be said that what really counts for something here is the storytelling.

The journey begins amid the glassy modernity of Perth’s gleaming Concert Hall. From there, you’re bussed a few miles out into the Perthshire countryside to a blasted, burnt-out farmhouse. And its neighbouring barn, transformed into a forest of rifles and a maze of trenches for the National Theatre of Scotland’s sorrowful new World War One show The 306: Dawn.

There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an attack that has yet to be made, rather than a free dialogue with a set of characters and a story.