Kaite O’Reilly’s new play is a dark dark comedy, a Chekhovian family saga on a mainly bare stage that handles its subjects of aging, death and family with a rich and grounded intellectualism to be expected of the playwright’s work. The production itself skips lightly along the thin line that separates reality from a discomfiting dreamscape, the waiting room: everyone is waiting, for death, for life, for family members to arrive. It is an ominous comedy.

Shorter feels longer in the West End iteration of Motown the Musical, a minor-league jukebox venture that became a Broadway hit courtesy of an unbeatable back catalogue – keep those hits coming! – and a well-drilled production that at least delivered what it promised on the tin. Despite trims for London, the production feels more attenuated and looks markedly less polished, even if there remains little doubt that people who go expecting to rock out to the world-class sequence of hits won't hesitate to do precisely that.  

Birdwatching is not the most thrilling subject for a drama. In fact, next to watching paint dry, it is probably the poorer option. So there is something wonderfully clever and theatrically brilliant about Robert Holman’s 1977 play, which takes place at a popular birdwatching spot overlooking the mouth of the Tees, a location around which several lives meet and connect. You can see why this 90-minute play won Holman the prestigious George Devine Award, and it’s great that it has finally been revived in an absorbing touring production by Alice Hamilton for Up in Arms theatre company.

An innocently-intended Friday night out turns into something fearsome indeed in I See You, a Royal Court co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, that puts the tensions of post-apartheid South Africa under a sorrowful microscope.

It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own.

Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted the vampire romance Let the Right One In for the stage). But audiences who’d like to enjoy Thorne at his thorniest, rather than most Rowlingesque, might prefer to take a look at this, his 2015 two-hander about a couple and their loss of a child. It’s a Hogwarts-free zone and its main emotional fuel is horrific loss coupled with courageous honesty. Strictly for adults only.

“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger for creation and liberation in the imitation and destruction of another.

A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice.

Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its flowery bowers and fairies – cloying Victorian whimsy. Peter Brook’s white box production in 1970 effectively Tippexed out that option for the late 20th century. In turn, this version by the touring company Filter has put down a marker for the 21st.

Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. It’s a fascinating subject – de Gaulle had his former mentor tried for treason in 1945 after Pétain led France into Nazi collaboration – but Yes Minister co-creator Lynn, who also directs, seems unsure whether it warrants winking satire or solemn historical re-enactment, settling for a fitfully engaging hybrid.