From the creative team that brought you The Play That Goes Wrong in 2012 (and assorted sequels) comes this spy caper. As ever with Mischief productions, their latest work is a lot of fun and pays its dues to the great age of British farce (and pantomime too) with clever wordplay and physical comedy as things go increasingly awry.

There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in 2010 has been transformed from a vicious psychologically tough caper-movie into an almost jaunty puzzle-play, its sharp teeth removed.

You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New York premiere some 18 months ago.

When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here, another terrible moment in human history that resonates all through Giant. Since the play opened at the Royal Court last year, that ugly hum has grown even louder. Now transferred to the West End, it could have been written to give dramatic form to this most incendiary of talking points.

Watching the stricken faces on the split screen, I felt at times like callow Farfrae in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: when faced with Henchard’s account of his blackest misery, the young man replies “Ah, now, I never feel like it”. Well, hardly ever. It’s impossible not to be held captive by the eyes and words of the six actors sharing the roles of estranged father, mother and son in Nobel Prize winning Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Einkvan (Everyman).

There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara Castle’s fiery redhead and Margaret Thatcher’s immovable blonde hairdo the only relief, would grab 15 minutes of fame speechifying on the minutiae of policy, some puffing on pipes, some on full-strength Capstans.

In Dublin, a city that has changed more than most in the last 30 years, a young woman, with an English accent that is expensive to acquire, is cycling through sexual partners. We eavesdrop on their conversations, witness the physical intimacy fade as the psychological intimacy hesitantly grows, in that strange vacuum in which you realise that you know everything and nothing about the person in front of you.

Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Romeo and Juliet that flings us into a vortex of frontier-town politics where men are men and bad girls wear gingham. Sean Holmes’ vigorous production stirs up the original to prove that cowboys can be zombies and that you should always bring a gun to a knife-fight.

In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door briefly opens at the back of the space and the figure that has entered and sat down at the table also begins to emerge. When the stage lighting goes on, this tableau out of a Bacon painting sharpens and we can properly scrutinise the man. 

It's both brave and bracing to welcome new voices to the West End, but sometimes one wonders if such exposure necessarily works to the benefit of those involved. And so it is with My Master Builder, American writer Lila Raicek's Ibsen-adjacent play that nods throughout at the Norwegian scribe's scorching 1892 The Master Builder only to suggest that director Michael Grandage might have been better off staging that classic title instead: his Wild Duck, dating back to his Donmar tenancy, remains the stuff of legend.