This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional MP caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal which hit the headlines way back in 2009. One certainly might have expected Dan Patterson (of TV’s topical Mock the Week) and Colin Swash (from Have I Got New for You) to have been swifter out of the blocks in co-authoring the script.

"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I was born with arms like this."

This is the simple, straightforward opening to a show that is anything but. Husband-and-wife team Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser have devised something here that is part fairytale, part puppet show, part cabaret and part burlesque – with a fair amount of wry comedy thrown in for good measure.

The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is one of those epoch-making events that are so huge as to be almost beyond our comprehension. It affected the lives of literally millions of people. And has a resonance today. To understand this cataclysmic event, you feel, will require six hours of documentary, a two-month mini-series or a novel of at least 600 pages. Yet here is Howard Brenton’s new play, which opened last night, and it tells the story in one quick evening.

We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.

Vampire romance is a genre which has a mysterious tendency. Every time it migrates from one art form (say novel) to another (say film) it loses some of its darkness and acquires a strange sweetness. So it was with Let the Right One In, a 2004 novel by Swedish penman John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was made into a slightly less dark tale in its first Swedish film version (2008) and then into an even sweeter American film adaptation as Let Me In (2010). But if vampire romance lives by killing off its own dark soul, how will this stage incarnation fare?

Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral compass of all the kids and most of the adults. Gerhard Lamprecht’s early (1931) “talkie”, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder, has darker undertones, much admired by the obsessive 19-year-old Benjamin Britten.

It has been a hard slog, but he's emerging victorious in the end. Essentially, Shakespeare's Henry V tracks a military campaign. In Act One, the eponymous king declares war on France. By Act Five, against the odds, he has won and is sealing an entente cordiale with a kiss – wooing the French princess, Katharine. At the start of Michael Grandage's eagerly awaited West End production, the Chorus (Ashley Zhangazha) darts to the apron stage to address the audience with: "Oh for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!"

How do you solve a problem like...no, not Maria, Candide? Musicals are loved for their scores – and Leonard Bernstein’s one for this really is a cracker – but they’re held together by their books, i.e. the script/dramatic context that makes audiences care about the characters and plot. Filled to bursting with good intentions, Matthew White’s exuberantly rough’n’tumble new Menier production does its damnedest but there’s no disguising the fact that Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of inexhaustible optimism remains tension-free. 

With the current nostalgia for all things Dr Seuss, now is surely a good time to treat your little ones to the zany nonsense-rhyme stories as they are bought to life on stage. Kirk Jameson’s production has arrived, courtesy of Sell a Door Theatre Company, at the small West End venue of the Arts Theatre, a quaint, quirky place befitting of a uniquely looney show.

For increasing numbers of people, food is theatre, so what better time to combine the two into the slight, sweet, determinedly socially conscious evening that is Gastronauts? The Royal Court "happening" of sorts is catering to audiences of 60 per show during its sellout run. A devised piece that turns playgoers into diners while also asking them to question the ethics and ethos of food, the show in its questioning impulse seems the perfect antidote to festive-season excess. That said, some may be too busy pigging out on the crispy kale - please sir, may I have some more?