Arthur Miller is one of those geniuses whose plays are metaphor-rich even when their storytelling is slow. First staged in 1994, Broken Glass is surely his best late-period drama, and this revival, directed by Iqbal Khan, arrives in the West End after originally opening at the Tricycle Theatre last year. This time, the ever-watchable Tara Fitzgerald joins Antony Sher in the cast.

It’s not like we’re short of operas. Thousands of works spanning over 400 years make up the western operatic repertoire. Of these maybe 100 get a regular airing in contemporary opera houses, with only about 20 making it into the popular consciousness. For the rest, a trip outside the archives is rare indeed, with many scores still vainly awaiting their “modern premiere”. So why then, with so many works to choose from, do directors persist in returning to Bach – who famously never composed an opera – for inspiration?

It all started back on Thursday, 6 April, 1972. In the dining room of the less than salubrious Bush Hotel on the corner of Shepherds Bush Green, in a room that had once been Lionel Blair’s studio, the Bush Theatre was born. Over the course of the next 39 years, the Bush became a byword for small theatrical miracles.

On its stamp-sized stage Victoria Wood met the comparatively unknown young Julie Walters. Stephen Poliakoff, Sharman Macdonald, Jonathan Harvey amongst many others made their stage-writing entrance within its modest portals.

Welcome back Stephen Poliakoff. With his first new play for 12 years, the master penman has set aside his television excursions into history and memory — most recently Glorious 39 for the BBC — for a haunting, contemporary tale of chance encounters and mysterious city nights. As the title makes clear, the play is a vision of London which is both personal and meditative. For me, it felt like a trip to a world that is surprising yet also familiar.

You could call it the BBC Four effect. It’s fact-based fictions set in the past, more often than not about the absurdities of sexual mores or other changing customs. In the latest theatrical example, Steve Thompson’s new play - which opened last night - we time travel back to December 1975, when the surreal BBC comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus was due to be broadcast all across the United States. But wait a minute, here’s the snag: about one in four of the jokes have been cut. Why?

This is not exactly Edward II the musical. There’s no singing, but music plays a leading role. It is the food of love of the sort that dared not speak its name – and there is excess of it for my taste. The idiom is jazz of the edgy sort fashionable in Paris in the 1950s, reflecting pretty boy Piers Gaveston’s exile there, where he has been banished by Edward I for getting too close to his wayward son.

It’s not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England’s greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of aphorisms and expostulations, with a fair smattering of historical grandees thrown in for good measure. That this production is a two-hander is no impediment to appearances from Joshua Reynolds, Flora MacDonald, the Prince Regent and Oliver Goldsmith (“He goes on without knowing how he is to get off”), not forgetting Johnson’s beloved cat Hodge.

Ten years on from 9/11 and the polyphony of reactions will not, and should not, be stilled. Creative artists have had to tread carefully in what they amass, and how they present it.

It may not serve up all that much to get your teeth into, but Bijan Sheibani’s production of this 1959 play by Arnold Wesker looks fantastic on the plate. Giles Cadle’s saucepan-shaped set is framed by a giant chalkboard, scrawled over and over with daily specials in faded lettering; beyond it, the globular lamps and plate-glass window of the Tivoli restaurant can be glimpsed. 

Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the Haymarket stage, staff in hand, the West End's latest exercise in starry Shakespeare bristles with a quietly baleful urgency that erupts occasionally into a roar.