Is there such a thing as a human right to forgiveness? Nicholas Wright's riveting play about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa circles around this question, never flinching from revealing the atrocities perpetuated by that vile regime, never quite fully exposing the characters' motivations. As spectators, it demands answers of us. What is the price of your forgiveness? Where is the line between humanity and evil?

New writing for British stages has recently delivered several punchy plays that, having made their points, don’t hang around for long afterwards. With a running time of 70 minutes, Evening Standard prize-winner Rachel De-lahay's Circles is one of these. Set in the playwright’s birthplace, Birmingham, most of the story takes place on the upper deck of a bus — the number 11 circular service — that is one of the longest urban routes in Europe. The full round trip takes about two and a half hours, but De-lahay doesn’t keep us that long.

When a big star meets a small play, they go one of two ways - they step up to it like a believer, or they clue in the audience that this is all a bit low, throwing everything they have in the toolkit at it, playing the actor who does what one can with what's available these days. Bakersfield Mist is the arena for a battle between the honest integrity of Kathleen Turner, the Hollywood film star, and what at the moment is the mighty over-acting of Ian McDiarmid, the renowned British stage and TV actor.

In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our sheep", the sheep representing the  actual subject under discussion. It also offers a way of looking at David Mamet's one-act play Squirrels, too, for no matter how far away their flights of imagination take them, the characters will always find their way back to their original theme, with a little help from an improbable animal – a squirrel, not a sheep, but you get the idea.

"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, Hurrah, Hurrah", there should be celebration for him after battle. The Johnny of this story, Joe Bonham, an ordinary "Joe", got his gun alright, but there is no happy ending for him. Aged 20, one day in September 1918, he is saved from an exploding shell but reduced to a silent, faceless torso, lacking all four limbs and the ability to hear, see or speak.

The heat is on in Saigon, and 25 years after its world premiere, Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg's celebrated take on Puccini's Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of their collaborations (though I retain an enthusiasm for the pre-revised score of Martin Guerre) and there are moments in Miss Saigon where, truth be told, they trump the Italian master of romantic melodrama at his own game.

Some people say that, in the age of theatrical consultants, narrative deconstruction, and the so-called "multimedia performance", conventional theatre no longer cuts the mustard. But there are still those large swathes of any audience who love a smooth journey between a beginning, a middle, and an end. Who shuffle politely past others towards their seats, look expectantly towards the stage curtain, and know  exactly what's coming. And then go home smiling rather than thinking afterwards.

As glad as I am that you've chosen to read this review, I can't help thinking you'd get more kicks out of the Daily Mail's take on Microcosm at the Soho Theatre, if indeed there is one. Written by Matt Hartley, whose Sixty Five Miles won a Bruntwood prize for playwriting in 2005, Microcosm is, as its title suggests, an attempt to home in on the paranoia and anxiety expressed across the country by right-leaning suburbanites.

When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience.

Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell novels have captured an enormous new readership for history with their crackling sense of place and immediacy of tension - the plays created on them, now brought to London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, are relishable creations of different virtues. Mantel’s exquisitely detailed,  emotionally penetrating descriptions of weather, place or internal worries aren’t to be found.