This is, by my reckoning at least, the third major London production over the years of Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's dazzling curiosity of a show first seen on Broadway in 1976 and reappraised ever since in stagings both large and small both sides of the Atlantic.

Let’s start with what we know: the climate emergency is the single most burning question facing the planet. Our life on earth depends on tackling it. Right? Well, maybe not, argues theatre-maker Chris Thorpe in his new one-man show, Talking About the Fire, currently enjoying a short run at the Royal Court theatre.

As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the theatre. The set, designed by Moi Tran, consists of a sparsely furnished but spacious room, backed by a staircase. It is a place in the past but also anywhere and any time, both naturalistic and imaginary.

Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.

A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from American playwright Annie Baker to people in her inimitable way. In her hands this banal space is as dramatically charged as any windowless Beckett cell. 

It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.

It’s an elementary fact that Dickens sells at this time of year — look at all the perennial Christmas Carols sprouting up everywhere. But if grumpy old Scrouge is an instantly recognizable literary icon then so is the super sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of potential for Liverpool’s nascent film industry. Nearly a century ago, the long, white, towered construction in which the next "Spend! Spend! Spend!" millionaires were plucked from the old terraces and new housing estates of post-war Britain, spoke to the confidence that still suffused a great city in the 1930s.

Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy the scenery without maiming themselves.

More crucially, they have to pull off the Janus-faced trick of playing the amateur actors of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, indicated below in quotation marks, while getting the audience to applaud their brilliance. Mostly they succeed.

Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida; she ends it with another startlingly vigorous adaptation, again of a play in which women are abused by men both physically and psychologically.