There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the same 1963 show that swept New York last season. What one gets instead is the most deeply felt, penetratingly acted version of the piece imaginable. Following the press night curtain call, the show's 92-year-old lyricist, a spry Sheldon Harnick, took to the stage to pronounce this production the best She Loves Me he had seen.

Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom started life as a short stage play in 1984, drawing on its creator’s own experiences in the heady world of amateur ballroom dancing. That the iconic 1992 film exists at all is something of a miracle; production funding was scarce and no distributor was willing to screen it until it was accepted for the 1992 Cannes Festival. Strictly Ballroom is still an intoxicating viewing experience: a visually arresting and upbeat modern fairy tale, smartly cast and superbly performed.

An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter.

The cry "Let's pretend" must have been heard often when J M Barrie played with the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens or at Black Lake Cottage in Surrey. The five sons of Arthur and Sylvia, orphaned as children and adopted by Barrie, almost all had tragic lives: George died in Flanders in 1915, Michael drowned at Oxford, Peter later committed suicide. But during childhood they escaped into piratical adventures and an invented Neverland with "Uncle Jim".

What stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind of people we’re learning to call the disenfranchised have been Shepard’s focus for the last 40 years, and now they’re global news. In Fool for Love (which there’s still time to catch at the pop-up venue Found III) he exposed the grubby truth behind the working-class alpha-male ideal. In Buried Child (which won a Pulitzer on its first outing in 1978) he turned his X-ray gaze on the traditional American family.

This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power.  

For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like a wanton deconstruction of its space, which is cheeked into a knowing update that comes close to Edwardian music hall, and with aperçus stingingly relevant to the venue’s recent backstory (“Candles are much more atmospheric than electricity” is one such textual quip).

Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.

Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012) – the baby boomers are condemned for having a cushy lifestyle while their kids, the millennials, are having a hard time (indebted, homeless and underemployed). Play after play asks: will the new generation ever enjoy the same living standards as their parents?

If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.