As the much-loved Arthur Marshall so profoundly noted, Ibsen is “not a fun one”. One could, with as much truth, say the same about Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon of Athens: its misanthropy, missing motivations and mercurial shifts in temper do not spell a fun night out to most. It is greatly to the credit of director Nicholas Hytner and his team, therefore, that the evening, if it doesn’t exactly fly by, is consistently engaging, thought-provoking and downright intelligent.

Before Ibsen was, well, Ibsen, he had a successful career as a failed playwright. Producing works on a spectrum between unremarkable and outright bad, he muddled his way through to his late thirties when the publication of Brand derailed what might otherwise have been a spectacularly mediocre life’s work. With the change in fortunes came a change in tone – a welcome and necessary one if the leaden comedy of Ibsen’s early pastoral satire St John’s Night is anything to go by.

At the end of The Riots, the Tricycle Theatre’s verbatim response to last year’s upheavals edited by Gillian Slovo and Cressida Brown, a local Muslim whose home was burnt down in Tottenham was asked to give his view on why it had happened. He summed it up with three words: “Just – angry – people.”

The front door of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it’s a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting through the catatonic tranquility of domestic order, originally scandalised 19^th-century Norwegian society, but with scandal now rather harder to come by, Ibsen’s play has acquired a quieter, but infinitely more pervasive impact.

The Taming of the Shrew celebrates its own rumbustious, raucous (mis)behaviour, so why shouldn't Shakespeare's comedy be granted a production that follows suit? From an opening gambit involving bodily fluids sprayed in the direction of the groundlings to a food fight later that would put the bad boys of Posh to shame, Toby Frow's directorial debut at Shakespeare's Globe turns up the volume to consistently giddy effect.

"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.

The Arab Spring has arguably been the most important international event after the credit crunch, yet it seems to be of little interest to British playwrights. Parochial, obsessed with writing only what they know, they have been put to shame by Hassan Abdulrazzak, an Iraqi playwright who was born in Czechoslovakia and now lives in London, working as a scientist. His 2007 debut, Baghdad Wedding, was a big hit, and his long-awaited second play is set in Cairo during the revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.

You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."

You know that feeling when you start telling a story in the pub only to realise that no one is listening? You look up to see that that two people at the end have started a new conversation among themselves and the rest are laughing about something someone else said earlier? You falter a little, try to catch someone’s eye and wonder if you should just plough on or give up. This could be what Forced Entertainment's new show The Coming Storm is about, but it's hard to tell.