The signs were there early in Glenda Jackson's career that she would one day have what it takes to "ascend the Everest" (as the cliché has it) of Lear. So powerful was her performance as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet in 1965 that there was talk afterwards of her being cast as the prince himself. Two years later she was another disturbed woman playing Charlotte Corday unforgettably whipping Marat with her hair in The Marat/Sade.

Following no less than three smash-hit, sell-out runs in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe, the King’s Head Theatre production of Joe DiPietro’s Fucking Men, or F*cking Men (as the publicity calls it), now transfers to The Vaults Theatre in Waterloo for a five-week run. It’s clearly been around long enough to attract attention. But, apart from the shocking name, what’s it all about?

Terry Johnson's Dead Funny debuted at the same theatre in the West End in 1994 (after opening at Hampstead), and its starting point is the real events of April 1992 when two funnymen, Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill, died in the same week. It was a bizarre coincidence from which he fashioned a very funny play – which he now expertly directs in this welcome revival – about the Dead Funny Society, a collection of suburban oddballs who meet to celebrate their comedy heroes.

From Monteverdi to Schubert to Bernstein and Lloyd Webber the dramatic song cycle has travelled far and wide over the centuries, though not until Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years in opposite directions. His two-handed tour-de-force – first seen Off Broadway in 2002 – shadows Cathy (Samantha Barks, who was Eponine in the film of Les Mis) and Jamie (Jonathan Bailey) as they find and lose each other at a time when both are seeking recognition in their creative lives.

Who is the fool in Sam Shepard’s 1983 chamber play Fool for Love? Is it Eddie, the rodeo stuntman who repeatedly cheats on his girl? Is it May, the girl who keeps taking him back? Or is it the Old Man, whose philosophy of rolling-stone fatherhood fails to take account of the damaged lives?

Composer Henry Krieger’s highly anticipated Dreamgirls arrives later this month, but first up is the UK premiere of his less well-known but thoroughly likeable Side Show, based on the real story of a pair of conjoined twins who became 1930s American vaudeville stars.

Do we see enough in the UK of continental European drama in translation? No. Is what we actually get the best? Probably not in the case of popular German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest. Still, it's rendered into pithy, convincing vernacular by no less a writer than Conor McPherson, well enough directed by Ian Rickson and plausibly characterised by two fine Irish actors.

So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.

Populist playwright Peter Shaffer, who died in June, gets a rapid honour from this flagship venue, which – aptly enough – is putting on his most popular play. So popular in fact that it has already sold out and is therefore critic-proof. Directed by one of our best youngish directors, Michael Longhurst, and with live music by the Southbank Sinfonia, this spectacular show is certainly a hugely entertaining evening.

What’s incest got to do with a town in North Yorkshire? At first this seems a reasonable question to ask of Al Smith’s brilliantly written, if a little bit tricksy, play, which begins somewhere nearer to Guilford than to Leeds. The central character is Patrick, the father of an under-aged teen daughter, and husband of a hardworking doctor. The daughter has a best friend called Carly, and an older boyfriend called Adam.