Some people say that, in the age of theatrical consultants, narrative deconstruction, and the so-called "multimedia performance", conventional theatre no longer cuts the mustard. But there are still those large swathes of any audience who love a smooth journey between a beginning, a middle, and an end. Who shuffle politely past others towards their seats, look expectantly towards the stage curtain, and know  exactly what's coming. And then go home smiling rather than thinking afterwards.

As glad as I am that you've chosen to read this review, I can't help thinking you'd get more kicks out of the Daily Mail's take on Microcosm at the Soho Theatre, if indeed there is one. Written by Matt Hartley, whose Sixty Five Miles won a Bruntwood prize for playwriting in 2005, Microcosm is, as its title suggests, an attempt to home in on the paranoia and anxiety expressed across the country by right-leaning suburbanites.

When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience.

Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell novels have captured an enormous new readership for history with their crackling sense of place and immediacy of tension - the plays created on them, now brought to London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, are relishable creations of different virtues. Mantel’s exquisitely detailed,  emotionally penetrating descriptions of weather, place or internal worries aren’t to be found.

"Debris - literally!" Or so spoke a fellow reviewer as she sat down next to me, having navigated her way through the rubble scattered across the floor of Southwark Playhouse's aptly-named Little auditorium. It's here that Openworks Theatre in association with the Look Left Look Right company is reviving Dennis Kelly's 2003 one-act, Debris, which centres on a brother and sister in their late teens as they relive the darkest, most disturbing episodes of their lives. 

By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Rather too much as it turns out.

On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. It is said he wrote two of the Pajama Game songs uncredited but he could easily have written at least one other.

There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Joseph Heller’s cult World War Two satire is, after all, about a kind of purgatory: US Army bombardier Captain John Yossarian is trapped by the absurdities of bureaucracy within a cynically perpetuated war where the ubiquitous Catch-22 states that anyone asking to be declared insane and discharged from duty must be well enough to continue to fly - fear of death being a rational human response.

Waiting For Godot is one of those plays which even those who have never seen know something about. “A tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett's subtitle described it, in which two tramps in bowler hats blether on about boots and a bloke who never appears, and where, in Irish critic Vivian Mercer's immortal words, “nothing happens twice”. And if they know nothing else about it, they surely can quote the play's most famous line: "We give birth astride of a grave."

Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was first greeted enthusiastically at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mockumentary". Fair enough as the author David Henry Hwang appears as a character in his own play, a mixture of autobiography and fiction.