Richard Nelson (b. 1950) is a leading figure in American theatre but also a consistent documentarian of his country’s liberal consciousness. His series of plays about the Apple Family, written between 2010 and 2013, have been critically acclaimed for their portrayal of the upstate New York clan’s gatherings on significant historical days. They are performed for the first time in the UK at the Brighton Festival in May.

It’s been quite a journey for Ayub Khan Din. Born in 1961, the acclaimed playwright grew up in a crowded Salford household, the youngest child of a Pakistani father and a white English mother. The cultural clashes he witnessed – as his Anglicised older siblings fought against the straitjacket of Muslim tradition – were the raw material for East Is East. His admired and important play, first performed in 1996 and soon made into a popular film, is back on tour after a run in the West End.

When writers research, it’s not all about digging for facts. Feelings also count. When Nina Raine spent three months visiting hospitals for a play about the medical profession, she found a strange feeling spontaneously erupting inside herself. “The funny thing is I was getting up early for me, 6.30, to get on a bus to be at the place by a quarter to eight and I just started within a week to feel like a put-upon doctor saving people’s lives. Don’t these people realise I’m going to hospital? You do start to get this God complex.”

Fresh from global domination with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently garnering rapturous reviews on Broadway, inexhaustible playwright and adaptor Simon Stephens has swapped Mark Haddon for Anton Chekhov and a new version of The Cherry Orchard, now previewing at the Young Vic. It’s not his first time bringing late-19^th-century work to the venue, having enjoyed enormous success with A Doll’s House in 2012, but it is his first time tackling Chekhov, who he readily professes is his all-time writing hero.

This year the nation has been spirited back to 1914. Every aspect of the First World War has been explored - its causes debated, the horrific conditions on the front revisited. And yet there has been less talk of the psychological impact of trench warfare, which is why Nicholas Wright’s new stage adaptation of Regeneration will greatly add to the sum of the centenary coverage. Pat Barker’s novel was published in 1993 - and filmed in 1997 starring Jonathan Pryce - but more than 20 years on there is still no shrewder or more moving account of shellshock.

Sofie Gråbøl as Danish royalty: it hardly stretches credulity. The face of Nordic noir has been a star in her home country ever since appearing in Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror in 1987, but is solely familiar on these shores as Sarah Lund, the jumpered Copenhagen detective from three unmissable series of The Killing. This autumn the only thing that will be recognisable about Gråbøl will be those big blue eyes as she is spirited back to the late Middle Ages, bewigged, bejewelled and billowing, to play a queen of Scotland.

Celia Imrie is admired and loved as a comic actress. Her conversation, just as much as her performances, is full of her trademarks: sudden darting looks, alertness, natural timing, changes of register. They will all be in display in her cabaret show Laughing Matters.

As of next year, John McGrath will be the most senior artistic director of a national company in the land. Rufus Norris will be freshly installed at the National Theatre of Great Britain on the Southbank. Laurie Sansom started at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013. McGrath launched National Theatre Wales in 2009. Since the first production, A Good Night Out in the Valleys, toured the old Miners’ Institutes of the South Wales coalfield in March 2010, McGrath has set about staking out new notions of what a national theatre can be. 

Jonathan Kent was an actor before he was a director. Indeed, he had not directed a single play when in his mid-40s he assumed control of the Almeida Theatre in 1990. By the time he and his co-artistic director Ian McDiarmid has left more than a decade later, they had enforced a vital shift in the ecology of London theatre. Kent lured big names to work for small paychecks: Diana Rigg and Ralph Fiennes were soon followed by the likes of Kevin Spacey, Juliette Binoche, Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchett.

Dmitry Krymov (b 1954) is one of Russia’s most groundbreaking and celebrated contemporary theatre directors and set designers. Performances by his “Theatre Laboratory” are renowned for combining multimedia with art installation techniques to surprise and thrill audiences across Europe and as far afield as New York.