What to do with an old warhorse like The School for Scandal, a fantastic play written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1777 full of smart lines and great parts, beloved not just of professional actors but amateur troupes too - and therefore performed with sometimes monotonous regularity? Well, if you're director Jessica Swale you cut a bit, add a bit and give it some musical numbers while remaining mostly faithful to the original.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a storefront pastor in Harlem who leads her flock with absolutist conviction. No drinking, no smoking - the way to the Lord is through abstinence and clean living, and she herself embodies these righteous goals. So woe betide Sister Margaret when her far from clean-living ex-husband, a musician called Luke (Lucian Msamati), arrives at her door after many years.

A town called St Cloud, a girl named Heavenly and a faded star who feels she’s living on the Moon: the imagery of Tennessee Williams’s drama is celestial, yet he puts his characters through hell. Amid the clamour of church bells and self-righteous moral hypocrisy, this torrid play invokes castration, venereal disease and prostitution, with love and sexual passion colliding violently with repressive social strictures.

One of the promises of artistic director Nicholas Hytner when he took the helm of this flagship 10 years ago was to stage new and innovative musicals. His problem, of course, is that these don’t grow on trees. So after the triumph of Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2003, we had to wait eight years for London Road, the venue’s next British hit. In the meantime, the United States has occasionally plugged the gap — and now provides this current musical, in the shape of a critique of American capitalism by New York’s the TEAM.

What kind of legacy will the Blair years lave on ordinary people? Some predictable answers but also some unexpected, haunting personal accounts emerge in a drama inspired by the spectacularly successful 1974 play Kennedy's Children from American actor-playwright Robert Patrick. 

The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot.

There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton’s pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to sustain their 30-year hell of a marriage; the other, in the rarely-performed Second Part, is a prelude to both liberation and death. The symmetries and the differences are cleanly underlined in Tom Littler’s production and the degrees of light admitted in to Jerwood Young Designer James Perkins’s sets.

There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation. Writers Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, co-founders of Belarus Free Theatre, have pulled off an astonishing coup: their feast for the senses, directed by Khalezin, tells horrific stories without melodrama, without overstatement or buckets of blood - and it is all the stronger for its brilliant mix of matter-of-factness and lyricism.

Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.

“My three men,” declares the deeply compromised heroine of this 1928 experimental drama by Eugene O’Neill. “I am whole.” Nina Leeds – hungry for love, ruthless with her own heart and those of others – burns like the sun at the play’s centre. She is given a portrayal by Anne-Marie Duff, in this fine production by Simon Godwin, so scorching that she all but self-immolates, while her men circle her like planets, helpless to alter their course. It is an impressive achievement – even if the work itself remains unwieldy and unsatisfying.