From 69 hours of King James Bible reading over Easter Week to this racy evening of adapted medieval pith as we head towards Assumption Day, the word they tell us is God moves in fluid if not necessarily mysterious ways around the Globe. “Mysteries” refers to the guilds that put on these popular street shows in the Middle Ages, real enough for the company of York Pinners, say, to supervise the nailing to the cross. It needs the forthright actors and everyday props of Deborah Bruce's alternately funny and quietly moving production, as well as the blood and sawdust you can taste in Tony Harrison’s latest performing version.

Dana Alexander, Underbelly ****

After 12 years in the business, Dana Alexander, an ebullient and instantly likeable presence on stage, is still the only black woman on the Canadian comedy circuit. Not that her ethnicity is Alexander's pre-occupation – it most definitely isn't – but it does play a part in her act.

The talented Mr Jude Law is back on stage in what must be the hottest ticket in the West End. Although not everyone warmed to his 2009 Hamlet, the mere presence in central London of one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars is enough to bring a touch of sunshine to a wintry summer. My main anxiety was that, as a reaction to the riots sweeping the capital, the Government would call a curfew and close the show, which was due to open last night. I needn’t have worried. It opened on schedule.

"Drop that long face," we're urged during the end of the giddy Regent's Park revival of Crazy For You, and if ever there were a time for such sentiments, it came during the lockdown that London remained under during the all too aptly cloud-filled evening that saw the Open Air Theatre not quite full. Nor was it lost on many spectators that the glorious George and Ira Gershwin score was giddily filling a night air punctuated at regular intervals by the distant (or maybe not) sound of sirens.

“There’s nothing worse than dirt in your tea,” opines one of the stoic officers in RC Sherriff’s First World War drama. It’s a pronouncement, emitted from beneath a stiff upper lip, of courageous cheeriness in the face of circumstances so brutal, so horrifying, so obscenely soaked in blood and suffering and futility, that taking refuge in mundane routine is one of very few available comforts. Small wonder that gentle, fatherly Lieutenant Osborne, seeking solace between the pages of Lewis Carroll, finds the absurdities there so familiar.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to suggest that new plays by up-and-coming talents are something of an Achilles heel at the National Theatre. Even Mike Bartlett’s much lauded Earthquakes in London was a far more exciting production than it was a play, while Greenland proved so devoid of audience that it was pulled early from the schedule. The latter did no favours to anyone by yoking together four dramatists including the impressive Penelope Skinner. Now four more emerging playwrights have been given their head but this time their voices remain distinct in the two double bills that comprise Double Feature.

Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright who once made a big splash in London. After having work such as The Glory of Living, Spinning into Butter, Boy Gets Girl and The Sweetest Swing in Baseball staged at the Royal Court Theatre in the first five years of the new millennium, she then disappeared from view. Now she’s back in the capital with a 2001 play, whose UK premiere opened last night and which takes a peek at some close relationships between cops and hookers in a small Midwest town.

Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice old gent setting out for an afternoon stroll. Unless, of course, you’re passingly acquainted with The Godfather.

A blackout, a snowstorm, a scream, and there you have it – the longest-running play of all time. The mystery of The Mousetrap is legendary, preserved by a code of silence that bonds all those who have performed and watched this classic whodunnit. Yet greater even than this is surely the enigma of how so generic, so unassuming a play should come to endure so persistently. Is it merely tradition that keeps Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap in business, or can this period piece really still have something fresh to say in its resolutely RP tones?

In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.