To revive a long-defunct play is dicing with death for a touring theatre company - was the play ahead of its time, or was it not good enough in any time? W Somerset Maugham was a commercial and critical giant in London theatre in the Twenties, but The Sacred Flame - an odd hybrid of whodunnit and (a)morality play - was one that didn’t make it out of its period.

What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day.

In the non-Olympic sport called “Name Britain’s greatest living playwright”, most of the contestants have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite would be Caryl Churchill, who has been creating provocative and boundary-busting drama for four decades. Her plays Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money are curriculum classics, and her recent work — Far Away, A Number and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You — triumphantly proved that her originality remains unimpaired with age.

Updating Chekhov is nothing new, despite the preliminary flurries about this production. Yet the singular directorial take can only highlight the master’s modernity in the bigger issues. If Australian iconoclast Benedict Andrews had continued as he seems to begin, with a Stanislavsky-like realism for today, passing anachronisms like the optimism for a better life in centuries to come, the idleness of a servanted household and a shockingly abrupt duel might jar.

John O’Keeffe’s 18^th century classic Wild Oats is a play about players and an uproarious love letter to the theatre: a perfect fit for the re-opening, after 18 months of massive refurbishment, of Bristol’s Old Vic, originally constructed in 1766 and the oldest surviving working theatre in the UK. 

Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead.

He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows, though, brings a prickling sense of horror, as Michael Attenborough’s production lends a disturbing dimension to Shakespeare’s bleak tragedy.

With the American presidential election campaign now in full swing, the search is surely on for cultural expressions of the two nations that the candidates represent: white rich people versus the rest. Okay, maybe an exaggeration, but who says I’m unbiased? Anyway, a new play from Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most innovative black American playwrights of his generation, runs the risk of being seen as a metaphor for Obama’s first term in office. But does this burden the new play with too many expectations?

The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, inspired by the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, is soon to return to the West End with Will Young. Its less well-known source is John Van Druten's 1952 play I Am a Camera. The title comes from the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood's memoirs published in 1939 inspired by his years in the capital of a country reeling from the last war and suffering from the global Depression: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

After years spent in the dark alleyways of abuse, where the only optimistic light is the sickly glow of neon, some new playwrights are emerging into the sunnier meadows of romantic comedy. The market leader must be David Greig’s delightful Midsummer (2008), which was also a love letter to the city of Edinburgh. Now, Phil Porter’s quirky romcom has come down from the Edinburgh Festival, ready to set metropolitan hearts a flutter and warm even the most cynical temperament.