Nick Payne has already made quite a mark. In 2009 he won the George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright with the intriguingly entitled If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet at the Bush. Wanderlust followed at the Royal Court and now with his second Court commission, transferred to the Duke of York's from Upstairs at the Royal Court, he’s come up with bees and multi-universe theories, love and death.

There’s no attempt to romanticise the hero of Nick Dear’s new play about the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas, who died in action in the Battle of Arras in 1917 after enlisting at the age of 39 – far too old to have had to fight – is played by Pip Carter as prickly, petulant and with an alarmingly misogynistic streak. He tramples over the feelings of his adoring wife Helen and displays an unattractive physical cowardice when ambushed by an angry gamekeeper on one of his long country rambles. 

Science thrives on stage. In play after play, various scientific ideas seem to flourish in the warm, well-lit environment of the theatre, fed by a crew of artists and despite the threats of critics or other predators. Now, Lucy Prebble — fresh from her outstanding success with Enron — turns her attention to the subject of love and neurology in her latest play, which opened last night. Directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold, the play stars Billie Piper so it’s already sold out, but is it any good?

Not even a cameo by Tamsin Greig can redeem this painful adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. For an hour and a half it screams with anguish, verging at times on the parodic. The production is a puzzle. Caroline Bird has updated the language, stripping the original of much of its poetry and adding expletives.

This is a short play, but not a sweet one. Nevertheless, the ban on under-16s and the warning that it “contains themes that some audience members may find distressing” seems unnecessary for more than 50 of its 70 minutes.

Howard Barker is hardly known for light entertainment. In The Europeans, a raped woman gives birth on stage. In Scenes from an Execution, currently at the National, a Renaissance artist is at war with her patrons. In Lot and His God, based on the Genesis story set in the wicked city of Sodom, Lot's wife betrays her husband with an angel. Complex might be putting it nicely.

The word “people” of the title of Alan Bennett’s new play is to be spat out, like a lemon pip. People, who invade your space, boss your values, make you be what they want. So does the beleaguered Lady Dorothy Stacpoole feel about the stark options facing her as her fantastically grand mansion leaks and crumbles over her smelly, freezing feet, while under it groans ancient mine workings like a whale with toothache.

Confession time: I’m a sucker for a romantic reunion. When lost-presumed-dead twins Sebastian and Viola finally rediscover one another alive and well at the end of Twelfth Night, you’ll find me in tears. And, yes, the late, great Nora Ephron’s New Year’s Eve climax in When Harry Met Sally works every time. All of which makes me more than well-matched for the musical-theatre version of the epistolary romance Daddy Long Legs. Dear Reader, I remained dry-eyed.

Hot on the heels of the latest English uncle over at the Vaudeville comes Dyadya Vanya from Moscow, bringing with it no samovar or old lace. Rimas Tuminas, the Vakhtangov Theatre's artistic director since 2007, has chucked out the Stanislavsky tradition of Chekhovian naturalism and in his own singular attempt to render what he thinks the characters feel as well as say serves up a stylised ritual that nearly suffocates the humanity of the drama.

The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.