Death means learning to say "I love you" in the woozy world of Ghost, the 1990 film that has become a breathlessly vapid musical sure to keep hen parties happy for some while to come (especially now that Dirty Dancing has closed and Flashdance barely got going). The material is cheesy, often defiantly so, and it's here been polished to a high sheen by the director Matthew Warchus and a design team who pull out all the stops in order to snap to attention even the most ADD-afflicted in the house.

Can Thomas Heywood's prosy Jacobean drama of country folk hunting, card playing, screwing around, sliding aristocratically into debt and harrowing one another to death translate successfully to the aftermath of the First World War? Only, perhaps, as edgy semi-farce, towards which Katie Mitchell's nervy, twilit production sometimes veers, not often intentionally. Acting to make you half believe in impossible characters might have saved it. But here you spend less time focusing on the poor puppets who flap around Mitchell's claustrophobic world than looking at the handsome, haunting set.

Situation comedy relies on strong brands, and some ideas just run and run. Yes, Prime Minister is the stage version of the long-running 1980s BBC television shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which memorably starred Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington. First seen at Chichester last year, the play now returns, with a new cast, for a second West End season. But how does this trusty old brand stand up to the stresses and strains of current political life?

Kafka is a bit of a stranger to British stages at the moment, but elsewhere he remains a strong presence. In his short parables, as well as in his classic novels such as The Trial, he conveys a deep understanding of the human condition. But while European postmodern culture might shrug off his insights, he is still close to the heart of some Middle Eastern theatre-makers.

Until quite recently, plays about sport were as rare as British Wimbledon winners. Then, over the past couple of years, came a whole slew of plays about various sports, led by punchy stories about boxing, from Roy Williams’s Sucker Punch to Bryony Lavery’s Beautiful Burnout. Now this growing list of recent fixtures is joined by Wexford-playwright Billy Roche’s bitter-sweet and humorous play, which originally premiered in Dublin in 2008 and opened last night in north London with several Roche veterans in its new cast.

What is a "good" death? How do most of us want to die? These are not questions that we often stop to ask, particularly in the theatre, where deaths tend to be either heroic or sordid. Two years ago, however, the playwright Nell Dunn’s partner of three decades died slowly, painfully, of lung cancer. On his last day he felt as if he were drowning, but of the five NHS professionals who visited him at home, all were trained to prolong life, none to ease the suffering of the dying. Home Death, therefore, is her story, and those of others, about dying at home: good deaths, bad deaths.

The creative seed, once planted, can take a long time to germinate and come into bloom – in this case 37 years. For Victoria Wood, 1974 was a seminal year – she turned 21, she won New Faces and she saw a Thames TV documentary about the Manchester Children’s Choir who famously sang Purcell’s "Nymphs and Shepherds" with the Halle under Sir Hamilton Harty in the Free Trade Hall. That recording, featuring 250 children from 50 Manchester schools, was in 1929 and the resulting 78rpm Columbia record became an unexpected hit, selling a million copies.

"Onward we go," the hearty but essentially hapless Wilson Mizner (David Bedella) remarks well into Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical that has been slow-aborning, and then some, since it first appeared in workshop form in New York as Wise Guys in 1999. Three titles and two directors later, the same material has been refashioned into the restless, always intriguing, fundamentally incomplete musical now at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the south-London venue whose Sondheim forays to this point (Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music) have generally struck gold.

A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic of love and internecine war into a very small sawdust ring, with horses, jugglers, aerialists, clowns and gymnasts. And as you park your car on the green and wander over under the quiet afternoon sky to the cute white tent where a rackety little brass band is parping and blaring from inside (and check out the “War and Pizza” trailer for the interval), you are in for a ridiculously good time.

For a couple of years now British theatre has been harvesting a new crop of young female talent. Market leaders such as Lucy Prebble (Enron) and Polly Stenham (That Face) have made a splash in the West End, and where they led many others have followed.