Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor’s latest West End outing – Noël Coward’s post-war comedy Relative Values – lands solidly in the upper-middle reaches. Why not the unqualified upper? The stock answer here would be that Coward’s play is fatally flawed, blighting even a director at his best. Any alternative risks straying into the stickiest of ideological mires, braving the final social and theatrical taboo: class.

Written and directed by the ever-varied Amir Nizar Zuabi, Oh My Sweet Land tells the story of a German-Syrian woman living in Paris and struggling with her connection to the raging civil war abroad. Zuabi, the Palestinian theatre-maker who gave us 2012's divisive treatment of the story of Abraham in The Beloved and the RSC's Middle East-inspired take on The Comedy of Errors, now looks at similar themes of love, loss and reunion, albeit with a very different tone. 

Gavin Creel licked his trophy in delight, Zrinka Cvitešić spoke of making Croatian history, and Sharon D Clarke let out an exultant "wow" from the podium that was surely heard well beyond the walls of the Royal Opera House. And so it was Sunday night at the 38th annual Laurence Olivier Awards, which coupled the occasional surprise (the win for Once leading lady Cvitešić very much among them) with the unusually meritocratic sense that for once - and not before time - the right people were receiving the right awards.

Cardiff Bay’s Bute Street is home to many imposing buildings, a large number of which are derelict. They have the potential to become something more than they currently are. They can be revived, and that’s what Louise Osborn has done by mounting her site-specific production to one of them. Roar Ensemble and Sherman Cymru have brought Maudie’s Rooms back to an old customs and immigration house in Cardiff after sell-out performances last year.

The Royal Family: politically irrelevant anachronism? Fodder for tourism? Or enduring symbol of what it means to be British? Mike Bartlett’s shrewd new drama, in a taut, economical and strongly acted production by Rupert Goold, tussles with issues of the limits and shifting values of monarchical power, and with questions of national identity. It has a playfulness that occasionally borders on the glib – yet it also has teeth.

If rock is magic, then what about its creators? Are they wonderful magicians, or empty charlatans? Infused by the spirit of the Patti Smith song of the same name, playwright Simon Stephens’s new play puts a rock star centre stage — and then lets him implode. Given that he is played by Andrew Scott, one of the most charismatic actors of the British stage, the result is often compelling. Add to the mix some beautifully sculpted visual effects, care of Carrie Cracknell, who directed the award-winning A Doll’s House, and the result is certainly memorable.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton's musical was first seen in the West End in 2000, where it received mixed reviews and ran for just under a year. In 2009-10, they reworked the show for productions in Canada and South Africa under the title The Boys in the Photograph, and now it receives its first London revival in Union Theatre. Although it has the original title, Lotte Wakeham's spirited and thoroughly enjoyable production is essentially the revised version, with its more uplifting ending.

Flying masonry put the Apollo in the headlines late last year when part of the theatre’s ceiling collapsed; now an airborne vampire and an impressive refurbishment give it new life. A cyclorama of dark tree branches and cloud-scudded skies covers the ongoing repair work overhead.

Are the 2010s a rerun of the 1980s? You know that familiar feeling of déjà vu: economic collapse, royal wedding and Tories in power. Not to mention privatization and the spirit of rampant capitalism abroad in the land. Surely, these are the ideal conditions for a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s exposé of entrepreneurial greed, A Small Family Business, at the National, where it premiered in 1987. But does the play’s criticism of dishonesty remain resonant today?

The popularity of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia owes a great deal to the play’s brilliant weave of themes and ideas, outlined by characters from two different historical periods – Romantic and modern. There is breathtaking brio in the way the writer’s skill combines so many strands, with both humour and irony: from the mathematics of Fermat’s theorem to the exploration of fractals, and from the limits of rationalism to the flights of fancy that inhabit science just as much as poetry.