There’s a joke early on in Sweat, Lynn Nottage's superlative drama about American working lives, in which a lively bar-room conversation turns to the seemingly unlikely subject of NAFTA. It’s 2000, the Bush presidency just around the corner, and the impact of the acronymic North American Free Trade Agreement is about to hit the country's industrial heartlands.

Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre is a feat of exuberant brilliance, a gender-juggling romp that takes Shakespeare’s subversive text and polishes it so that it glints and shines like a glitterball at a disco.

It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both.

Director Declan Donnellan has a rich record of working with Russian actors: his previous walk on the Slavic side, the darkly powerful Measure for Measure that came to the Barbican four years ago, was preceded by some magnificent versions of Shakespeare, Pushkin and Chekhov.

It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism.

In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems.

The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.

A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage.

Need Shakespeare 's Falstaff charm to be funny? Those warm, indulgent feelings won by Mrisho Mpoto in the amazing Globe to Globe's Swahili Merry Wives and by Christopher Benjamin in a period-pretty version are rarely encouraged by this season's Helen Schlesinger (in Henry IV Parts One and Two ) and now Pearce Quigley for Ellie While's 1930s romp.

Githa Sowerby is the go-to playwright if you want a feminist slant on patriarchy in the industrial north in Edwardian times. Her 1912 classic, Rutherford and Son, has been regularly revived over the past 30 years, and now the National Theatreis staging it yet again, this time with the ever likeable Roger Allam in the title role.