Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party: comedy classic or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with added sneering? Ever since its first appearance on stage in 1977 and its subsequent record-breaking broadcast as a BBC Play for Today with an eye-widening 16 million viewers (not to mention those watching the subsequent DVD), there has been disagreement. Depending on your viewpoint, Lindsay Posner’s competent new production lives either up or down to your expectations.

Harley Granville Barker is hardly a household name, but he was a huge influence on British theatre today. During the Edwardian era, he promoted new writing at the Royal Court; he wrote plays such as The Voysey Inheritance, Waste and The Madras House, which have been successfully revived; he invented the modern idea of the director; he advocated permanent companies of actors; and he campaigned for a national theatre. Not a bad legacy. Now he is the subject of a new play, which opened last night, by American penman Richard Nelson.

Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as their stage for Owen Sheer’s The Passion last Easter. Setting themselves the challenge of producing 12 productions in their first 12 months, this building-less company have somehow turned a modest (not to say meagre) £1 million a year subsidy into a living, risk-taking tradition of national theatre.

What is it about the Sixties that keeps drawing us back? Surely, it can’t just be that anniversary thing – 50 years on? Perhaps, in these care-worn times, we just like to revisit our don’t-give-a-damn  anti-heroes, having their cake and eating it, pleasuring their mates’ marriage-weary wives, arranging abortions if things go wrong, downing pints in the pub. That was the life.

“The lady from the sea” is what a remote Norwegian fjord town calls the young second wife of its good doctor, an elusive woman who seems to walk in the footsteps of the ghost of her well-loved predecessor. Joely Richardson is doing much the same by taking on an Ibsen role previously frequented by her mother and sister, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and directed by her dad, Tony Richardson - and it’s hard to say whether it’s her comparative slightness of gifts or Stephen Unwin’s domesticated direction that make so little of an enticingly strange play.

What’s it like to be young, British and Muslim in the age of austerity? In an era of global financial crisis, high unemployment and shrinking pay packets, what can this country offer British Asian youth? New talent Ishy Din poses these questions in his storming debut play which takes a trip to the local snooker hall in the company of four blokes, plays a few rounds of pool, downs a few pints and then chats its way up and down the walls and across the ceiling of the place, before quietly staggering home.

Zach Braff’s debut theatre piece begins with Charlie (Mr Braff himself), in an empty house, swinging from a noosed extension lead, attempting to do the big FO while f(l)ailing to extinguish a cigarette and listening to the bagpipes on a record-player. At which crucial moment he is interrupted by Emma, a flibbertigibbety-type Brit realtor; then Myron, the local drama-teacher-turned-fire-chief/drug-kingpin; and then Kim, a callgirl. All of whom seem hell bent on spoiling Charlie’s big day.

The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winner of the 2005 Olivier for Best Newcomer), Christopher Shinn (nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize), Bola Agbaje (winner of an Olivier in 2008), as well as Michael Wynne, Chloe Moss and Alia Bano. This year, along with a full programme of readings, short plays, workshops and talks, it hosts two full-length plays. The first, which opened last night, is actor Luke Norris’s London debut.

“Winsome” isn’t a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noël Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinner word-charades of his hit Hay Fever. Yet now (as then) it’s a word that speaks to precisely the brand of giddy, self-conscious charm Coward’s play so determinedly exerts. Howard Davies’s new production splashes gaily about in the work’s theatrical shallows, giggling, posing and romping with the skill of a Monte Carlo ingenue.

“Am I for t’ see mi own lad bitted an’ bobbed? Theer’s more blort than bustle i’ this world - an’ ‘er’s a clat-fart”. Welcome to the old curiosity shop of English drama, from which Manchester Library Theatre director Chris Honer has dusted down one of DH Lawrence’s mining plays, written a century ago, around the time of Sons and Lovers, and not even published, let alone performed, in his lifetime. Lawrence didn’t have much luck with his plays, not being a la mode. Even today, they are not often seen.