Most Brits don’t know much about South Africa today, but we do know about house values, so this new comedy by South African playwright and screenwriter Amy Jephta is comprehensible – even in its incoherent moments (of which there are several).

Into a world of grooming gangs, human trafficking and senior prelates resigning over child abuse cases comes Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s masterly musical. Is its grim tale of workhouses, pickpockets and domestic violence an awkward fit with today’s values? 

There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?

It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and some duds, too), but as often as not it's a particular sight that sticks in the mind.

It is not just Twelfth Night, it’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will in The Folio, a signpost of the choices the inhabitants, old and new, of Illyria must make. Perhaps it’s also an allusion to Will’s own choices as an actor/playwright in the all-male company who cross-dressed (and maybe more) as women and girls without batting an eyelid. As is so often the case with the comedies, the great entertainer doesn’t hesitate to smuggle in a soupçon of transgressive psychology under cover of farce.

This feels like the theatrical equivalent of being in a centrifuge – a wild, spinning ride through different forms of reality that deftly separates out the different layers of who you think you are. It’s a multiverse that’s like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Everything Everywhere All At Once – both liberating and challenging as you hurtle from one situation to another.

Shakespeare must have relished the opportunities brought by the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in 1611: sound magnified in a way impossible outdoors, magical stage effects in the semi-darkness, possibly even fireworks - and all at a time when the masque was the most fashionable theatre form. The Tempest, written especially for the venue, includes a masque and has masque-like properties throughout.

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.

Can men really love each other – without sex? Or, to put it another way, how many different forms of male love can you name? These questions loiter with intent around the edges of Tom Stoppard’s dense history play, which jumps from 1936 to the High Victorian age of the 1870s and 1880s, and is now revived by the Hampstead Theatre starring Simon Russell Beale.