Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The great Caryl Churchill careers down a blind alley in Here We Go, and the results aren't pretty, especially within the cavernous confines of the National Theatre's Lyttelton – this writer's second play this year at that address. A 45-minute triptych about death that gets worse as it goes on, the play put me in mind of the American critic Walter Kerr's famous remark about Neil Simon not having an idea for a play but writing one anyway.

Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who was in turn influenced by both of the great Scandinavian playwrights. Something of that pitilessness does emerge in Richard Eyre’s return to the Almeida, chiefly through an unsparing performance by Lydia Leonard and a blend of cold intimacy with powerful nature in Tim Hatley’s designs.

Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene –  until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are impossible, freeing director Dominic Dromgoole to ignore spectacle and visual dislocation in favour of an emotionally-driven, chamber take on this late romance.

A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed.

Hollywood took 365 speaking parts, 50,000 extras and 2,500 horses to tell this epic tale in 1959; here at the Tricycle, it’s a cast of four and some enterprising puppet work. Playwright Patrick Barlow, following up global hit The 39 Steps, has chosen a comic contrast that could hardly be equalled: redux maximus.

Welcome to the hellmouth. In Jamie Lloyd’s startling 50^th anniversary revival, the seething, primal hinterland of Pinter’s domestic conflict is made flesh: the metal cage surrounding an innocuous living room glows a devilish red, sulphur-like smoke belches from the ether, and snatches of Sixties music distort into horror film cacophony. Purists may carp, but it gives a long-revered play a welcome shot of adrenaline.

RD (“Ronnie”) Laing was a typically eccentric 1960s guru. A Scottish psychiatrist who was one of the leading lights of the anti-psychiatry movement, his 1960 classic The Divided Self helped a whole generation to a deeper understanding of mental illness and especially the experience of psychosis.

In the world of dramatic rediscoveries, half a century may not count as a long time. Slightly more, in fact, with Robert Bolt’s first performed play Flowering Cherry, which premiered in 1957 with Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson in the leads as the eponymous husband and wife, Jim and Isobel Cherry.

Derren Brown calls himself a mentalist, but he's also a great showman, as his latest show, Miracle, attests. With its simple set, this is seemingly an evening of straightforward illusions. But that's deceptive, as Brown provides more than two hours of intricately constructed theatre that has a very big message – that humans have the power within ourselves to change our lives, and to heal ourselves.