The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.

It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.

As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London.

Ain’t Too Proud? Ain’t too good either, I’m afraid. Which is a shame as there’s plenty of the raw material here that powers juggernaut jukebox musicals around the world, but this production has the feel of a cruise ship show with a much tighter band and better singers. 

There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. 

It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense.

Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calderón de la Barca’ s ever-startling baroque panopticon, a play so precociously meta that every theatrical game from Pirandello onwards deserves the epithet “Calderonian”.

“Wagatha Christie” – I salute the bright spark who coined the term – describes, for those who don't follow such fripperies, the social media spat between footballers' wives Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney (married to Jamie and Wayne respectively), which later became the subject of an multimillion-pound court case.

Eugene O’Hare’s The Dry House is the kind of spare but oddly lyrical three-hander that would have made a good Wednesday Play back in the day. For Conor McPherson fans, it will seem like familiar terrain, with all the ingredients for an unusual domestic drama. Think, one interior, probably a humble home or a pub, where a small cast sit and drink, talk, confess, drink some more. Some of them are dead. 

People can’t find the food they want in the shops. Nobody has enough money. Public services are under pressure. And there’s a big Royal occasion to take our minds off things.