Spooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett’s epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play Earthquakes in London begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning in the metropolis, dozens of people wake up and they’ve all had the same disturbing dream. The play, which opened last night, then goes on to examine what happens when citizens rise up to challenge the system in an era of foreign war and economic austerity.

At the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel Dorfman’s play, which won an Olivier Award on its first outing in 1991, is a powerful reminder that Pinter was a human rights activist. He was also a friend of Dorfman so this revival, which stars Thandie Newton and opened last night, is an inspired choice of production.

As autumn turns to winter and we enter “the dark half of the year”, National Theatre Wales opens its second season with a 16-show tour of village halls around the Principality. This is a time when the portal between ordinary life and the spirit world is traditionally opened up but The Village Social, written and directed by Dafydd James and Ben Lewis, does not so much leave the door ajar as, for one night only, kick it down and allow the darkest imaginings of an entire community to run riot in this most innocuous of environments.

“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than once in the evening. For this exceptionally hilarious and perceptive play, which opened last night, not only tickles the insides of your arm, but also lights up the senses and then gives you a quick cuddle, too.

Sharon Gless is best known for her role as Detective Christine Cagney in Cagney & Lacey, and then to another generation in the American version of Queer as Folk and currently in the drama Burn Notice. Gless's sexy voice and feisty demeanour in several of her roles has prompted many a fantasy over the years – for men and women, gay and straight - so it's apt that the actress, now a very fit-looking 68 and still in possession of a throaty laugh, is playing a woman who discovers her sexuality in her late sixties.

John Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the subjects of failure and national identity in language that is both highly rhetorical and at the same time feels as if it is torn from the gut. His 1964 play about the washed-up London solicitor Bill Maitland, which opened last night in Jamie Lloyd’s revival, is one of his masterpieces.

So it's back, then. Garlanded with awards, lionised in London and on Broadway, Jerusalem starring Mark Rylance returns to the West End for a limited run, in the same production and with many members of the earlier cast(s). Is this an opportunistic, irrelevant, premature revival? On the contrary.

Russia’s Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, has enjoyed imaginative treatment on the British stage and screen. Brighton Theatre’s now-legendary Vanity conjured the world of the verse-novel Eugene Onegin vividly with three actors and minimal props. More folk will remember the cinematic Queen of Spades, with Anton Walbrook’s crazed gambler terrorising the ancient Countess of Edith Evans to death for her secret of three winning cards. Could this sparest of tales, zooming between irony and fright, work equally well on a small stage?

Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to new premises. Its 400th year has been a good year for that collection of stories currently being advertised elsewhere as “the book that changed the world”.

“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?