The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”.

Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a year later, but with polymath Philip Ridley’s amazing debut, The Pitchfork Disney, in 1991. Now, with this long overdue revival which opened last night, we get another chance to sample a powerful and imaginative drama in all its glittering and eerie strangeness.

With its mistaken identities, a meddling mother, a chest of precious jewels, gulling of fops and two pairs of thwarted lovers, it's easy to see Shakespearean overtones in Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 masterpiece. And because She Stoops to Conquer's witty and intelligent heroine, Kate, outsmarts her would-be suitor Marlow, it's even more tempting to see it as having shades of The Taming of the Shrew, only without the difficult bits for modern audiences.

No one can exactly accuse Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play of falling into neglect. From Howard Davies's National Theatre revival to this latest reclamation by the Almeida, The House of Bernarda Alba has received six separate airings in (or near) London within almost seven years. The various treatments include an American stage musical, an adaptation relocated to Pakistan, and a puppet play performed to a pre-recorded Farsi soundtrack.

Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker and her client, a working-class single mother who kills her baby. Inspired by the notorious case of Baby P, the piece adopts an intriguing form in order to examine the realities behind the tabloid headlines about evil mums and monstrous sinners.

The Old Vic Tunnels would seem to be the perfect place to set three of Eugene O’Neill’s three earliest plays about the sea, drenched as they are in the stench of life in the heavy engine room of merchant navy life. For the tunnels, secreted directly underneath Waterloo Station, shudder ceaselessly to the rumble of trains overhead and are saturated in their own heavy industrial atmosphere. Indeed as you enter you’re hit by the smell of dust and damp running at full blast. Come prepared. It’s dark and putrid down there. Wrap up warm.

Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr!). The effect was electric, and the scandal outlasted the show's run. In Simon Stephens’s new version of the play, which opened last night, the original story has been supplemented with a longer second half that updates the action to today, and sees mad boy Ubu tried for war crimes.

Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hall Company, the show has finally arrived in the West End.

You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.

Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.