The world premiere here of Monkee Business the Musical was planned long before the untimely death in February of Davy Jones, the Manchester-born member of the manufactured band that outsold The Beatles and the Rolling Stones half a century ago. The coincidence lends a poignancy to the event and the Manchester run has been dedicated to his memory.

A play of boundaries, limitations, barriers, one that gazes outwards while never crossing the threshold, Uncle Vanya is often betrayed by the physical space of major stagings. In a new production at Notting Hill’s The Print Room the audience find themselves trapped along with Vanya, Sonya and their dysfunctional family in a single room. Ranged around the four walls we crowd in upon the (in)action, waiting together with the characters for the rupture that will release the tension.

This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of the night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But even as the fake blood flows and the gurglings mount, Jamie Lloyd's sturdy but sometimes sluggish production of John Webster's masterpiece (c 1614) isn't exactly gripping.

Little more than a year since The King’s Speech hit pay dirt at the Oscars, David Seidler’s tale of a prince stuttering between duty and impediment takes to the stage. Rather than a speedy and cynical exploitation of the film’s success, the move actually reflects Seidler’s original ambition for his story; and while we might reasonably have feared déjà vu and a pale shadow of the film, what we discover is a thematically richer, yet equally delightful experience.

There is nothing quite so exciting as witnessing the debut of a fresh new voice. But young writers can be rather frail creatures, and their exposure in the high-profile Royal Court Young Writers Festival might sometimes highlight their failings as much as their virtues. In actor Hayley Squires’s first play, which opened last night, there is plenty of evidence of a fiery new talent coming into the world, but also some doubt about the writer’s ability to mould her insights into a compelling story.

If it's possible to take a loving and empathic approach to decidedly intractable material, the director Michael Attenborough achieves precisely that with Filumena, in which Samantha Spiro follows on from (and surpasses) Judi Dench in author Eduardo De Filippo's title role of the one-time Neapolitan prostitute who in early middle age decides that what matters most is to be una mamma.

Ethnic tensions in France have been in the news this week, with the siege of the gunman Mohammed Merah, so award-winning South-African penman Craig Higginson’s new play seems really timely. First seen in this country at the Salisbury Playhouse, and opening last night at Theatre 503 in south London, this story about the relationship between a French-Congolese student and an English teacher during a hot Parisian summer is full of emotion, and ideas.

The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26 years after the author’s early death, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era masterpiece has attracted a steady stream of film-makers and theatre directors. But their adaptations have so often floundered that one genuinely fears for anyone fearless, or foolhardy, enough to take it on.

In 1888, the extremely weird Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, the radical lefty son of a shipping merchant and a housemaid, wrote a play called Miss Julie about the conflict between the classes, between love and lust, between obedience and servitude, and between all the possible variations on these knotty and tortu(r)ous themes.

Melodrama is not something we accept easily these days, tittering gently as the gore runs, moving restlessly in our seats as heroes or villains declaim to the gallery. So all the more odd, on the surface, that Sweeney Todd is the most popular of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. On the surface. Because, under the melodramatic posturing, Sondheim creates a cold, hard, bleak world.