Titles can be warnings as well as come-ons. In Gary Owen’s new play about a teenager growing up in the Welsh Valleys, it’s not difficult to guess what the main theme of the play is. Stumbling out of the performance tonight I had the distinct impression that this is the most disturbing, even chilling, play of the year. Not only is it written with enormous skill, but what it has to say about men, and boys, feels both emotionally true and morally repellant. It’s a drama about truths that maybe I just don’t want to know about.

In a peculiarly Beckettian development, the creative team of this Sydney Theatre Company production spent several weeks of rehearsal waiting not for Godot, but for their director. Tamás Ascher – who spotted the casting potential of Uncle Vanya co-stars Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh for the 1953 absurdist classic in which nothing happens, twice – was eventually forced to withdraw, leaving company director Andrew Upton to work within the set already developed by Ascher and designer Zsolt Khell.

Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein’s new play, Now This Is Not the End, the city is remembered with a touch of nostalgia by Eva, an old German lady living in London. But these memories are under threat: she is beginning to suffer from dementia so her vivid recollections are becoming cloudy – can anyone help her preserve her past?

There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a poet of comparable word-magic and a composer to reflect the crucial role of music at the Athenian festivals, serving the drama with masks and compelling strangeness, as Peter Hall did in his seminal 1980s Oresteia at the National Theatre (poet: Tony Harrison, composer: Harrison Birtwistle, peerless both).

Many matches are made in Fiddler on the Roof but the matchmaking prize goes to Grange Park Opera for getting Bryn Terfel to take on the role of Tevye. Having only recently played Sweeney Todd, and indeed throughout a varied career, Terfel has proved that he can treat lighter music with respect and sincerity, not to mention plenty of good humour.

“The only way is up” might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn’t have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it lost its entire Arts Council grant overnight. Yet here we are, seven productions later, looking back at a season that has included an almost bullish proportion of new and rarely performed writing.

The play’s the thing, once again, in the latest backstage comedy, an affable if limited dig at luvvie pretensions. Noises Off still reigns supreme in this genre, with successors unable to match the bravura precision of Michael Frayn’s masterful multitasking farce, though the triumph of The Play That Goes Wrong proves there is an appetite for further displays of theatrical chaos.

Beauty transforms itself into a beast but an inner grace shines forth regardless: such is the enduring power of Bernard Pomerance's stage play The Elephant Man, first seen in London almost 40 years ago and a Broadway semi-regular ever since. The latest New York revival has transferred lock, stock and star-driven barrel to the West End, where local audiences can discover something I've had occasion to remark upon twice over the years on Broadway – for all his A-list screen actor status, Bradley Cooper is entirely at home on the stage.

St Paul’s Cathedral is an icon of national identity. The building that rose up from the fire and smoke of the Blitz has also witnessed the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Di some twenty years later. In October 2011, this temple of God found that the Occupy anti-capitalist movement had set up camp outside its monumental front steps. Steve Waters’s new fictional account of this episode of protest shows how the Dean of St Paul’s responds to this action — and it stars Simon Russell Beale in the main role.

Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman it was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodness for Restoration comedy, stepping into the breach as reliably as it did with The Man of Mode in 2007 (who could forget Rory Kinnear’s Sir Fopling Flutter?). Throwing everything and the ancestral silver at the play, director Simon Godwin delivers an evening generous with wit, joy and affection.