The “femmepersonators” of Harvey Fierstein’s 1962-set drama would be flabbergasted by today’s level of trans visibility, from Grayson Perry and Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent and Eddie Redmayne’s new film The Danish Girl. Yet it’s the still pertinent issue of private experience versus public profile that sparks a schism in this idyllic community of closeted cross-dressers, along with thorny questions of how gender fluidity might correlate with a more flexible approach to identity and sexuality.

Welcome back Martin McDonagh. It’s been more than 10 years since you’ve had a play on in London, and I was beginning to think that we had lost you to Broadway, and Hollywood, for ever. As you know, I loved it when your Leenane Trilogy burst onto our stages in the late 1990s, and although I wasn’t that keen on some of the follow-ups, your The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and The Pillowman (2003) are among my favourite plays.

It’s a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh’s clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west T.S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party should also be having its opening night. Back in 1956 another Royal Court premiere – John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger – called time on Eliot and his dramatic ilk, ushering him into a neglect from which he has never really recovered. But now, sitting once again alongside a younger, more daring breed of theatre, Eliot’s drama proves that – given a chance – it can hold its own.

Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre.

Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have some knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka in 1871 to a proudly nationalist (if half-Byelorusian) father and a mother whose pioneering work in women’s rights she continued.

If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there's always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick set in a struggling shoe factory, and the Cyndi Lauper/Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned, first on Broadway and now here. Lauper's score resides principally in the funk and spunk of cross-dressing catwalk glamour while the somewhat dowdy spirit of Northamptonshire - the vernacular of the piece - is barely hinted at in the "Price & Son Theme" of the opening number.

With the election of lefty outsider Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, are we entering a new era when upsets and surprises have become a new way of life? Is it really true that anything is now possible? As if to engage with these pressing questions, Tanya Ronder’s new play is all about how a perfect family is suddenly visited by some totally unexpected events. What starts with a dodgy doorknob escalates over 90 minutes into a full-scale domestic breakdown.

One of the oldest and most striking venues in London lends itself to immersive theatrical experiences. A few years ago the Victorian interior of Wilton’s Music Hall was infused with pre-show activity to recreate the 1920s of The Great Gatsby. Now a similar flick of the wrist by the same director draws punters into the 1930s and an adaptation of one of cinema’s great con capers.

Nicole Kidman has returned to the West End 17 years after causing an innuendo-laden sensation in The Blue Room, the David Hare play that promptly transferred from the Donmar to Broadway, where one major magazine at the time actually bothered to inform readers where best to sit for the optimal view of a stage semi-neophyte en déshabillé. 

Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human history” – come thick and fast, emblazoned on a screen and spouted by four versatile performers. Some pieces, written in collaboration with scientists, are fuelled by those stats, others crumble under their weight.