There is a grainy piece of black and white film on YouTube featuring Noel Coward as the celebrity guest on a 1964 edition of the popular television panel show, What's My Line. He signs in with panache, paying careful attention to the diaeresis over the e in Noel and enveloping his first name with a stylish C from the second. Artifice, self-invention, elegance – these are qualities inseparable from the Coward reputation.

Yasmin Reza’s God of Carnage (2008), like her British megahit, 1994’s Art, is not strictly a comedy. The French dramatist likes to create gladiatorial spaces disguised as chic living-rooms, where the professional classes slug it out, chewing their way through all manner of pieties and prejudices to reach some kind of climactic end point.

To proclaim that you’re playing gender games with Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you have a bicycle with two wheels, or indeed that you’re doing something interesting with rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.

One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem with all the thrills and spills of an Indiana Jones outing, with added Olympians. The National’s version turned out not to be The Odyssey as we know it, though.  

CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★

This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in playful games with the idea of theatricality.

Distant Memories of the Near Future, Summerhall ★★★★

Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★

The Insider, ZOO Southside ★★★★