When feminism was really cool, female playwrights would write flatshare dramas about a group of women, each of whom was representative of a certain way of life. The play title would just be a list of their names. The classic example is Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi from 1976. Does this mean that Amelia Bullmore’s new play, which also has a title listing its female characters, is a trip down nostalgia lane?

On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of 700 men, 235 were killed, 350 wounded, “mown down like meadow grass”. Such was the fate of the Accrington Pals, formally the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) of the East Lancashire Regiment. Some of the lads were as young as 16, inspired by local pride and national patriotism to fib about their age in order to join their mates.

While Kafka specifically declined to indicate exactly what kind of creature Gregor Samsa becomes in his horrific overnight transformation, translators of the novella have gone for a variety of options: bug, beetle, cockroach or vermin. In this stage version, there is no attempt to imitate the appearance of any insect by means of costume or make-up; instead Gísli Örn Garðarsson uses his gymnastic skills to indicate movements alien to human beings while retaining Kafka’s underlying sense of a suffering man trapped in his new body.

David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that Liam Neeson was miscast in the role of Oscar Wilde. Now comes a revival, directed by Australian Neil Armfield that has, on the face of it, dream casting in Rupert Everett as the Irish playwright hounded by the British ruling classes for his homosexuality.

Most of us would love to live in a happy family, but it’s the unhappy ones that make the most compelling drama. And few playwrights do familial tensions as instinctively as Polly Stenham, whose highly successful 2007 debut That Face and 2009 follow-up Tusk Tusk both explored the tensions between parents and children. In her new play, she revisits the mother-son relationship, and adds some thrilling twists to the bubbling brew.

For all its ruminative merits, Richard Vergette's drama is not the “searing political thriller” it purports to be. It raises lots of interesting questions, but they get in the way of any deep emotive power.

Few productions give the sound designer absolute pride of place, but such is the presumably inevitable nature of a play called The Silence of the Sea that what isn't voiced counts every bit as much as what is. Gregory Clarke's aural landscape works overtime in a 95-minute piece (no interval) that couples speech with sustained silences, yes, but also with eerie ambient noises that suggest all manner of offstage activity complementing the brooding stillness on view. Engaging?

Here’s an elegant thing to do before eight o'clock dinner - stroll out for an hour’s recital of a rollicking story-poem done by a leading actress in a hip underground venue with judiciously hip application of modern dance, then go off and diss it over your sushi. Very London life.

“What should it matter to us if a few words, then a few more and then a language just go,” asks Iain Finlay Macleod’s richly textured play. Somersaults may end in a shrug of inevitability, but its thrust is that language defines identity. In losing a few words, we do not just lose sounds. We endanger traditions, memories and relationships.

The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard. Just for a start, those opera companies who had been burning to perform a version of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade could now finally proceed.