Playwright Joe Orton was a merry prankster. His main work – such as Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969) – was provocative, taboo-tickling and often wildly hilarious. Now the Young Vic is staging a revival of his debut, Entertaining Mr Sloane, directed by this venue’s new supremo Nadia Fall, and starring celebrity polymath Jordan Stephens. But does 1960s provocation still resonate today?

About halfway through this world premiere, I realised what was missing. Where is the sinister lift, where are the long corridors and, most of all, WHERE IS MR. MILCHICK? 50 First Dates: The Musical may indeed be the sunnier cousin of Severance, but it’s also much older, tracing its roots back to the mid-hit movie of the same name.

The word "after" can be elastic when a modern writer is inspired by a classic. Nima Taleghani here stretches it to breaking point, although, to be fair his piece is also described as a new play. It is not so much "after" Euripides as a celebration of theatre with frequent sideways reference - mostly knowing and comic - to The Bacchae.

The impact of great art is physical as much as it is psychological. I recall the first time I saw Perry Henzell’s 1972 film, The Harder They Come. I’d been in the pub and, as we did then with just four channels, slumped in front of the television to see what was on late on a Friday night.

Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab. On the psychological level, is it partly an evasion, an escape from telling the truth about oneself? The transition from fantasy to honesty in Conor McPherson’s first play of 1997, so much better than his latest, suggests as much.

If a classic story is going to be told for the umpteenth time, there is a good bet it will come with a novel spin on it. So it proves with a new Dracula by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Emma Baggott. 

Hot on the heels of Goodnight, Oscar comes another fictional meeting of real entertainment giants in Los Angeles, this time over a decade earlier. Michael McKeever’s The Code is a period piece, but one with a resonating message for today’s equivalents of the Hayes Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

If you ever wanted to know what a mash up of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, stirred (and there’s a lot of stirring in this play) with a soupçon of Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams looks like, The Kiln has your answer.

Like the lighting that crackles now and again to indicate an abrupt change of scene or mood, Simon Stone's version of The Lady from the Sea is illuminated by the sense of adventure and excitement one has come to expect from this singular artist. That's the case even if the cumulative effect falls short of his devastating achievements with the National Theatre's Phaedra or, before that, Billie Piper in Yerma. 

OMG! I mean OMG doubled!! This is amazing! Or is it? Can Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre really be the best play on the London stage, or is it not? Can it be both brilliant and exasperating? At one and the same time? Probably. Maybe. Okay, now you’re in the zone.