There's a good deal of irony in the most controversial production of the Globe to Globe season turning out to be one of the least interesting. The Merchant of Venice was performed by Israel's Habima National Theatre, a company which has incurred the wrath of some for performing in the Occupied Territories, and there were protestors tonight, mainly of the flag-waving variety. The drama in the yard and the galleries was not matched on stage, I can unhappily report.

The battle of the sexes took on a bright and breezy tone in Pakistan's contribution to the Globe's ongoing Bardathon, the Theatre Wallay-Kashf's rumbustious production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's been more customary of late to treat this most vexatious of comedies as sustainedly ironic or as a far-from-funny exercise in domestic degradation. But the director Hassaim Hussain and his agile company were having none of that. If anything their production in its tone often suggested a dry run for The Comedy of Errors, which the Globe will host later this week.

Peter Brook is probably at his happiest in Africa. Through his Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, he has long had access to gifted Francophone black African actors. They’ve always been a significant contingent of his troupe there, which has also included Maghrebis, Americans, Japanese, Germans, French and even, sometimes, Britons. Brook’s first focus of attention was West Africa, then South: in 1973 he was blown away at the Royal Court by township actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and set out on a project to inhabit and stage the black African soul which has lasted four decades.

The Winter’s Tale may not be one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite a comedy, not quite a full-blown drama – but the Globe was packed on the hottest night of the year for this vibrant Yoruba version direct from Lagos. South-East London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria. The audience was maybe 40 per cent Yoruba-speaking (my daughter thought 70 per cent), and their gusts of laughter and murmurs of affirmation set the tone for the rest of the crowd’s responses.

Plays about media folk and creatives, such as Joe Penhall’s Dumb Show and Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man, are not uncommon in British theatre. They usually have recognisable middle-class settings, recognisable middle-class characters, and a couple of handfuls of punchy one-liners. The writing and acting usually veers from soap-opera parody to perceptive analysis of the way we are defined by our media-fuelled obsessions. So where on this scale of quality is writer, director and actor Matthew Dunster’s latest play?

It's both easy and fashionable to render ironic, or scoff at, the title of All's Well That Ends Well. This is the Shakespeare "comedy" in which the rabidly obsessed Helena finally ensnares her none-too-doting Bertram in a putative happy ending that tends to be played as if the pair are advancing toward the gallows. But it's in the way of Shakespeare's Globe in general and the miraculous Globe to Globe season in particular that, as served up by the Arpana theatre company from Mumbai, one of the Bard's three problem plays emerges as both jubilant and touching.

Transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, this is a very tight staging of a very messy evening. Ten members of the Riot Club come together for a celebratory meal after “two terms out in the cold”. In a modest pub on the outskirts of Oxfordshire, they hang a bin bag on each chair, down their wine by the bottle and start on a 10-bird roast. The plan: to get “absolutely chateauxed” and trash the place in the traditional manner of their aristocratic ancestors.

Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.

"37 Plays. 37 Languages." This is the tagline for the Globe Theatre's Globe to Globe season, hosting theatre companies from every corner of the world. The season may be international in outlook, yet the language used to perform this version of Love's Labour's Lost is at once home-grown, yet very different from the words of Shakespeare.

As the Olympic Park rises out of the desolation of East London, British theatre is also being regenerated by the sports fest that looms increasingly large on the horizon. Although it has recently lost its local authority funding, Edward Hall’s Swiss Cottage venue is no slacker when it comes to ambitious work. Having commissioned upcoming talent Mike Bartlett to adapt Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film, Hall has already secured a West End transfer for the play, in advance of its opening last night.