If it's possible to have rather too much of a frolicsome thing, consider by way of example The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a giddily self-conscious 1607 romp from Francis Beaumont that would be more fun if it were at least a full scene or two shorter.

The most ambitious musicals spring from the most unlikely sources – you need go no further than Stephen Sondheim to establish that – but turning those musicals from novelty into living, breathing, involving experiences requires very special talent. Back to Mr Sondheim. Everyone who writes in this medium owes him a huge debt of gratitude but some – like composer/lyricist Gwyneth Herbert, the fresh voice behind The A-Z of Mrs P – would seem to have evolved almost in spite of him, from another place altogether.

You may have a slight sense of déjà vu about a stage production of The Full Monty. Wasn't it a Broadway hit at the turn of the millennium? Well yes it was, but that was an Americanised musical version of Simon Beaufoy's Oscar-nominated 1997 film; now his adaptation of the movie is in the West End after its acclaimed debut last year at Sheffield Crucible, and the setting is back in familiar territory.

“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”

It takes a particularly hard heart to fail to be moved by the sheer scale of community fragmentation around the time of the Miners' Strike – for many, the single most devastating period in the north of England's social history. But maybe, just maybe, this Brassed Off play is not quite as stirring as it should be.

“Consider the donut!” One might have assumed that a significant chunk of Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts would be a heartfelt ode to the fried dessert cake itself. In fact Letts’s play, set in a donut shop nestled in an economically and culturally diverse borough of Chicago, dwells on the personal and political make-up of the shop’s most dedicated staff. All two of them.

Andrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003.  But “As You Like It”, for all its light touches, is a challenging proposition: both in terms of the way the author treats complex relationships between play-acting and authenticity, true and projected love, goodness and evil, but also because the many-threaded story doesn’t unfold with quite the same elegance as in some of the other comedies.

Another week, another postwar classic. Hot on the heels of last week’s revival of Oh What a Lovely War comes another legendary play from the Joan Littlewood museum of great one-offs. This time it’s a restaging of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play about poor parenting and teen pregnancy in Salford. Although this play is lauded in most history books as a great radical breakthrough, it has attracted fewer revivals in recent years than plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

Winston Smith is alone. Isolated in a pool of light, with an anglepoise lamp at his shoulder, he is about to pen the first entry in his private diary. But he is, of course, being watched. Mark Arends' Winston is, after all, living in the nightmarish superstate where Big Brother keeps every citizen perpetually under surveillance, even when they don’t know it.

Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).