Banking and the financial world may have gone into free-fall, but there are still killings to be made. Particularly personal ones. Nicholas Pierpan’s You Can Still Make a Killing is a morality tale for our time, a revenge tragedy without corpses, except for reputations. And, in the City, reputation – or rather perception - is everything.

Samuel Beckett recalled sinking into a "whirl of depression" while writing All That Fall. Audiences at this production - those, that is, who have managed to score a ticket for this short, sold-out run - are unlikely to emerge into Jermyn Street in a similarly gloomy frame of mind.

Pity the A-level English student: for them the “rarely seen masterpieces” that creep onto the curriculum and into the theatres. Judging from the frequently giggling reaction of the audience last night of around 100 17- and 18-year-olds, Eugene O’Neill’s tricky tragedy Desire Under the Elms isn’t going to be winning too many A*s among them next summer. Which is a pity, because this is a tough, gnarled play which strips human instincts to their bones. Hatred is its key emotion, loneliness its key condition.

Spain's Golden Age turns unaccountably to dross in Damned by Despair, the Tirso de Molina play that is a good half-hour shorter than the running time given in the programme but won't (in this production, anyway) ever be brief enough for some.

Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there’s been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revivals of plays such as Abigail’s Party, all to the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

"All this hatred is exhausting," or so remarks Will Young's ceaselessly grimace-prone Emcee in Cabaret in a comment that encapsulates the evening as a whole. Returning to a show he directed to acclaim on the West End six years ago, the director Rufus Norris has reconsidered John Kander and Fred Ebb's song-and-dance classic with less nudity, stronger voices, and lots of stage business where its bite should be.

Like several of Bill Naughton’s plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day. Subsequently, it was rejected for the stage by producer Binkie Beaumont, who apparently tried to get Michael Caine or Albert Finney for the lead role of Joe, considered an “Alfie-size” part by the author. “The setting might be poor, but the characters are rich, at least, so I think,” he wrote to Binkie.

Site-specific theatre is hard – where to put the audience, can they stand for nearly two hours, how do we enable them to see/hear, most importantly, what is the purpose of the site and how is it to be used? Verbatim theatre, too, is hard – how to shape a narrative, how to develop characters. Put the two genres together, and what have you got? A well-intentioned, rather unfocused mess, to be honest.

Walkouts are always intriguing. When audience members leave before the final curtain, it’s usually a sign that the play is too powerful, or too scandalous, or maybe just not very good. After reports that during previews many people aren’t returning after the interval in this revival of Howard Barker’s 1985 play, Scenes from an Execution, you have to wonder — is it the play or the production? Or is the National’s audience too conservative to appreciate this remarkable play?

Our Boys shines a light on young war veterans in a military hospital in the early Eighties. A hit at the Donmar Warehouse in 1995, this new revival balances brash humour alongside some moving moments, but ultimately lacks punch.