There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a poet of comparable word-magic and a composer to reflect the crucial role of music at the Athenian festivals, serving the drama with masks and compelling strangeness, as Peter Hall did in his seminal 1980s Oresteia at the National Theatre (poet: Tony Harrison, composer: Harrison Birtwistle, peerless both).

Many matches are made in Fiddler on the Roof but the matchmaking prize goes to Grange Park Opera for getting Bryn Terfel to take on the role of Tevye. Having only recently played Sweeney Todd, and indeed throughout a varied career, Terfel has proved that he can treat lighter music with respect and sincerity, not to mention plenty of good humour.

“The only way is up” might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn’t have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it lost its entire Arts Council grant overnight. Yet here we are, seven productions later, looking back at a season that has included an almost bullish proportion of new and rarely performed writing.

The play’s the thing, once again, in the latest backstage comedy, an affable if limited dig at luvvie pretensions. Noises Off still reigns supreme in this genre, with successors unable to match the bravura precision of Michael Frayn’s masterful multitasking farce, though the triumph of The Play That Goes Wrong proves there is an appetite for further displays of theatrical chaos.

Beauty transforms itself into a beast but an inner grace shines forth regardless: such is the enduring power of Bernard Pomerance's stage play The Elephant Man, first seen in London almost 40 years ago and a Broadway semi-regular ever since. The latest New York revival has transferred lock, stock and star-driven barrel to the West End, where local audiences can discover something I've had occasion to remark upon twice over the years on Broadway – for all his A-list screen actor status, Bradley Cooper is entirely at home on the stage.

St Paul’s Cathedral is an icon of national identity. The building that rose up from the fire and smoke of the Blitz has also witnessed the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Di some twenty years later. In October 2011, this temple of God found that the Occupy anti-capitalist movement had set up camp outside its monumental front steps. Steve Waters’s new fictional account of this episode of protest shows how the Dean of St Paul’s responds to this action — and it stars Simon Russell Beale in the main role.

Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman it was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodness for Restoration comedy, stepping into the breach as reliably as it did with The Man of Mode in 2007 (who could forget Rory Kinnear’s Sir Fopling Flutter?). Throwing everything and the ancestral silver at the play, director Simon Godwin delivers an evening generous with wit, joy and affection.

Margaret Atwood’s Forties childhood was spent knocking around the Canadian backwoods with her forest entomologist, proto-ecologist dad, and it shows. Interviewed alongside her husband Graeme Gibson on the Brighton Festival’s closing night, the international literary prizes, like the gushing reverence with which she’s introduced by Festival director Ali Smith and received by the sell-out crowd, seems to have made little impression. This is a modest, earthy, dryly witty and straight-talking couple, with the self-sufficient air of those familiar with isolated, country living.

Jonathan Miller’s new King Lear is rustic to its core, spoken in broad Northern accents, and the whole production could be packed onto a travelling theatre’s wagon and taken around Britain pulled by a couple of shire horses.

“All children, except one, grow up.” So begins J. M. Barrie’s iconic tale of arrested development, given new power and poignancy in this high-flying production. A century after one of Barrie’s youthful collaborators, George Llewelyn Davies, was killed at Ypres, it tells their familiar story through the prism of the brutalising First World War, in which context Peter’s neverending youth becomes an escapist beacon.