Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logic surely cannot be defied. A full house for Pericles, and an ecstatic ovation?

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero.

It's amazing what working on a masterpiece can do. Commissioned to write a companion piece to Terence Rattigan's magnificent one-act drama The Browning Version, David Hare has abandoned his journalistic tendencies and written a gently oblique play of controlled emotional eloquence.

What a joy this once-in-a-generation season is. From Moscow comes this free-wheeling production of Shakespeare's great morality play, and one that also makes remarkably free with the text too. Even those familiar with Measure For Measure will be thankful for the surtitles, particularly in the second act when director Yury Butusov dispenses with whole scenes, including the denouement.

“It’s easy for me to talk to you; we don’t know each other”. Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: intimate strangers; bloodless wars; silent screams. Not one play at all but three short pieces – panels in an inscrutable triptych – its process is oblique, its emotional momentum cumulative, the impact devastating.

So, what's the "problem"? All is right with the world - or the theatre at least - in the Maori-language staging of Troilus and Cressida from the Auckland-based Ngakau Toa troupe that pierces right to the troubling heart of this first of Shakespeare's three so-called "problem plays".

Unlike the National, the RSC has not had a good record of producing exciting new plays in the past 20 years or so. But one exception to this rule is the theatre’s support for the work of David Edgar, whose masterpiece Pentecost was put on by them in 1994.

"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.

The Young Vic together with American Repertory Theater, Boston have taken on a huge challenge in staging the lengthy yet gripping memoir by Chinese writer Jung Chang that became an instant success when first published in 1991. Wild Swans was one of the first accounts of mainland China to be introduced to the West and as such it paved the way for other stories to be told from China.

Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time National Theatre Wales’ tech wizard Tom Beardshaw closes the live stream of Tim Price’s electric new play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning with the school pupils and soldiers we have been watching taking their bow, this is exactly what the "audience" are convinced we have witnessed.