The parade of stage musicals borne from films continues with Pride, which takes the open-hearted, small-scale 2014 movie of the same name and brings it to the stage with many of the film's creatives (director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford) along for the ride. The unbridled appeal to the emotions will be familiar to those who know Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, two other musicals sourced in sweet indie English films that acquired a full-throttle theatrical life of their own.

Post-Covid British theatre has a crush on adaptations, especially those with a star actor. So it’s easy to see why National Theatre chief Indhu Rubasingham is staging the latest sparkling verse play by Martin Crimp, whose electric version of Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy conquered the West End in 2019.

The erotic life of puppets – we discover in this show – is filled with intriguing possibilities that are denied to mere flesh and blood lovers. They can float up into the air when they kiss, glide backwards if they’re upset, and perform acrobatics that would be ambitious even for devotees of the Kama Sutra. 

French playwright Florian Zeller’s 2011 four-hander about infidelity and the deceptions it entails, translated by Christopher Hampton, returns 10 years after its UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory. A lot has changed in the personal communications world since its debut, but the play soldiers on with just a few appearances by early mobiles and no sign of social media.

King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. 

Bloomsday doesn't just celebrate James Joyce's odyssey through so many parts of Dublin that still teem with character; it's also putatively about the same 16 June 1904 when the budding writer first walked out with Nora Barnacle and she put her hand inside his trousers to "make me a man". Do all those folk who swan around in straw hats and frilly dresses know they're marking National Hand Job day too? Have any of them read his deliciously filthy early letters to Nora?

O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them. 

The best playwrights create word magic – and when that happens, you can’t miss it. Other writers produce journalism, or teaching materials. Sadly, for me, Christine Bacon is one of the latter, and her latest 90-minute play, A Fine Idea at the Arcola studio, is a didactic account of 80 years of international aid.

Anybody who relished the blistering family rows of Bad Jews or Admissions might be surprised by what their author, Joshua Harmon, wrote next: a three-hander still based on a warring family, but this time one closely resembling his own.

It’s 1959. Trinidad is fighting for independence from British colonial rule, while the US is beginning to stake its own control over the island, whether through labour exploitation or crime. Some of the locals are finding themselves torn – between a desire to escape, or to have a piece of the action. And it’s driving them towards disaster.