This is the final production in the Donmar Warehouse’s 12-week season at Trafalgar Studios (which showcases the work of its resident assistant directors) and is a revival of Jeremy Sams’s translation of Jean Cocteau’s play - first seen in Sean Mathias’s acclaimed production at the National Theatre in 1994, with a cast that included Jude Law, Alan Howard and Sheila Gish.

Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before Bennett decided to write a play of that very name, premiered in November 2009 at the National Theatre. Now, More4 has come along with a documentary chronicling the two men's collaboration on a work that is itself about a collaboration. And if Adam Low's behind-the-scenes take on an essentially private meeting of minds leaves you wanting more, well, even some of Bennett and Hytner in action is better than no glimpse of them at all.

I'm not sure that Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art will prove all that revealing for those already interested in and admiring of a playwright who, intriguingly, tends to resist being put under the spotlight himself, even as his own plays offer often deeply intimate, sometimes scabrous views of people no longer around to answer back. (Those who saw The Habit of Art during its extended run on the South Bank and then on tour will have learned more than they could ever have anticipated about the poet W H Auden's sexual, um, habits.) How open was Bennett willing to be, then, about a process - writing - that is itself notoriously tricky to dramatise? Enough to satisfy up to a point. And yet it was left to Hytner briefly to play the analyst, making clear that the play's original title, A/B, referred not just to its putative subjects, Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten (pictured below), but, of course, to the initials of its author. (This script's intermediary title, Caliban's Day, reported previously, went unmentioned.)

Instead, we got footage of Bennett and Hytner reflecting both jointly, and individually, on the play's birth pangs, along with snippets of commentary from its enormously talented leading men, Alex Jennings (Britten) and Richard Griffiths (Auden), the latter of whom stepped in during rehearsals following the departure due to illness of original co-star Michael Gambon. (The full impact of Gambon's exit on the rest of the company was not explored.) This recent material was interspersed with a version of, presumably, much the same enquiry into Auden and Britten's own professional and personal dovetailing and eventual separation that Bennett must have engaged in himself, though Bennett's own preface to the published script of the play is, in fact, more complete on this front than the documentary manages to be.

That said, it was fascinating to be reminded of the extraordinary ravines of Auden's face and how aptly evocative they are of Gambon, next to whom the smooth-cheeked Griffiths was about as far-removed physically from the poet he was asked at the 11th hour to play as it was possible to be. (Hytner's finished stage production made a wry joke out of that very fact.) And one might have liked an even greater investigation into the process whereby an apparently straightforward bioplay morphed over successive drafts into a far more complex and moving look at the relationship between play and playwright as Bennett decided to encase his Auden/Britten face-off within a show that just happens to take place within the very rehearsal room that Bennett can by now call a second home - a play, in other words, first intended to lay bare the lives of others turned into a meditation in some way on its creator.

With musical scoring including Britten's always welcome Sea Interludes, Low's film hinted at a creative reckoning in Bennett that finds rough equivalents to Auden and Bennett in his play, images of Britten walking the Suffolk beach paralleled by shots of Jennings making his way down one or another backstage corridor at the National. I waited in vain for a recapitulation of that delicious final speech in Bennett's play in which Frances de la Tour's inimitable stage manager, Kay, spoke the author's title. But to see Bennett visibly worrying his latest creation at this point in a career spanning a half-century of kudos was to be reminded that the habit of art can be as hard as, with luck, it is glorious. Let's hope it's one habit Bennett doesn't kick any time soon.

Overleaf: more Alan Bennett

Events surrounding the birth of the unrepentantly "un-American" Marc Blitzstein's early (1936-7) shot at socially aware music-theatre prove much more interesting than the show itself. Heck, I got more out of reading the programme than I did sitting through the whole darned thing. Let's face it, Blitzstein's mostly foursquare marriage of words and music sucks. Not that the dynamic Mehmet Ergen's latest Arcola team didn't give it their best shot.

“It’s this ghost they’re talkin’ about. I’m feelin’ an emanation meself. Unless I ‘ad too many pickled eggs last night.” If that’s the sort of crack that tickles your fancy, you’ll find plenty to make you chuckle in Ken Hill’s spoofish take on H G Wells’s novella, first presented at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1991. Should you also have a taste for rather well-worn magic tricks, you might find Ian Talbot’s new production positively transporting.

Middle-class family angst continues to be this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre, but this time it is seen through the eyes of 10-year-old girls at a 1990s boarding school. But don’t expect this to be an episode of Malory Towers or even the rather good-natured naughtiness of St Trinian’s. No, this is a bleak institution where the girls are foulmouthed and vicious in their rivalry. As Mrs B, who supervises the dorms, says to the headmistress: “They are small dogs doing what small dogs do.”

“Suicide, parricide and salivation!” Not the ecstasies of a masochist, but the mangled verbal fanfare announcing that The Rivals – Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic comedy of manners – is once again a fixture in London’s West End. When it comes to powerhouse comedic casting, the National Theatre has long had the laurels for 2010 sewn up in Simon Russell Beale’s voluminous britches. Partnered by Fiona Shaw in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, the pair were mighty indeed. Now, in the dying breaths of the year, we have Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles reunited in two much-beloved comedy roles. So does their Rivals live up to its name and challenge for comedic supremacy?

"Can't go on, ev'ry thing I had is gone". Hear Judy Garland deliver those lines from Arlen's "Stormy Weather" live at Carnegie Hall in 1961 and you'll know that no singer, not even Callas, could go further turning heartbreak into art and serving up the naked truth. I wasn't expecting this production of Peter Quilter's play, previously seen in Northampton, to do much more than echo your average queen's "such a tragic life" line, nor Tracie Bennett to go beyond a Star Impersonation.

Halvard Solness and Hilde Wangel have stalked each other among the shadow goblins of Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary symbol-laden drama in two major productions this year. In Chichester, Philip Franks’s staging and David Edgar’s new version of the text gave us a shivery, haunted-house interpretation. Now comes American director Travis Preston’s modern-dress offering, starkly designed by Vicki Mortimer, but performed with such over-deliberate mannerism and stylised Expressionist movement by Stephen Dillane in the title role that it sometimes manages to be both po-faced and faintly ludicrous.

The stripped-back bare brick of the theatre’s back wall encloses a steel staircase and a stage covered in dark grit. It’s a murky, inhospitable setting, as arid and chilly as the sterile marriage of Solness and his wife Aline, and as desolate and comfortless, perhaps, as the interior of the master builder’s troubled mind. Paul Pyant illuminates the darkness with shafts of late-autumnal light. This is the world of a man fearful that he is entering the twilight of his career and his usefulness, and tormented by guilt: Solness superstitiously believes that his success came at the cost of the conflagration of Aline’s ancestral home, and the subsequent death of their three infant children. Aline herself (a pale and fragile, yet fiercely riveting Anastasia Hille) first appears gliding in slow motion down the stairs like a watchful and tormented wraith.

Dillane is, initially, a louche and rangy Solness, coolly confident of the sexual magnetism that reduces his besotted book-keeper Kaja (Emma Hamilton) to tremulous, hungry helplessness. But if he seems in no doubt of his power to dominate with his virility, his dread of the young, and of their potential to usurp his professional position, is both sharp and pertinent; it feels startlingly modern in the context of Preston’s production. It’s channelled into a mean-minded refusal to allow scope to his talented assistant draftsman; and it is in part responsible for the voracity with which he greets the arrival of Gemma Arterton’s Hilde Wangel (pictured below right), whose fatal knocking at the door of the unhappy Solness home heralds irrevocable and inevitable change that will be both the master builder’s final glory and his destruction.

Where Dillane has an odd frigidity, Arterton is all flushed, febrile intensity. She’s an overt tease, her shirt carelessly unbuttoned, her hair tousled, her whole appearance and demeanour suggestive of post-coital disarray. She is arrogant, spoilt, given to fits of temper and sulks; it’s easy to imagine her as the 13-year-old she was 10 years earlier, when she first watched Solness hang a wreath on the spire of his latest creation. She claims he kissed her passionately and promised her a fairytale kingdom; now she has sought him out to hold him to his promise.

Their connection is wreathed in fantasy, folk lore and myth; they talk of trolls, demons and familiars, of building castles in the air. Here, it feels increasingly as if Solness might, indeed, be losing his sanity: is this creature with the flashing eyes and dangerous demands real, or a tormenting devil from his own imagination? Either way, Dillane’s performance grows steadily more exaggerated. His delivery of the dialogue (serviceably translated by Kenneth McLeish) is drawn out to occasionally melodramatic excess; he crawls, contorts, and crouches like the incubus in Henry Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare. Arterton, meanwhile, approaches a nigh-orgasmic frenzy of excitement, arching her back and undulating in pleasure. When Solness tells her of the fire, of the pneumonia that affected Aline’s breast-milk and led to their babies’ death, Arterton sensually caresses her own breasts and smiles with malicious glee. But if some such moments disturb, others – in particular, one in which Hilde and Solness imagine that she is a bird of prey and Dillane and Arterton accordingly flap their arms about – merely look overblown.

And that, essentially, is the sticking point of Preston’s production. Its passions feel too deliberate, too contrived to convince; and for all his howling, growling and curious physicality, Dillane’s Solness is a cold creation. There’s strong supporting work, not just from the compelling Hille, but from Jack Shepherd in the somewhat thankless role of the concerned doctor Herdal, and from John Light as the unfairly thwarted apprentice Ragnar Brovik. But as a whole, despite its careful construction, this is a shaky edifice.

• Read more theatre reviews on theartsdesk

MORE IBSEN ON THEARTSDESK

Ghosts, Duchess Theatre (2010). Iain Glen makes directorial debut with a straightforward take starring Lesley Sharp

Emperor and Galilean, National Theatre (2011). Power and pace help to exhume Ibsen's Romano-Christian epic starring Andrew Scott

Judgement Day, The Print Room (2011). Ibsen's last play has its issues but emerges strongly in new adaptation with Michael Pennington

The Lady From the Sea, Rose Theatre, Kingston (2012). Joely Richardson takes on the Ibsen heroine her mother and sister made their own

A Doll's House, Young Vic (2012). Period setting yields a contemporary tragedy adapted by Simon Stephens and starring Hattie Morahan

Hedda Gabler, Old Vic (2012). Ibsen's heroine draws new depths from the West End's sweetheart Sheridan Smith (pictured)

Love's Comedy, Orange Tree Theatre (2012). Early Ibsen finds the playwright in his awkward adolescence

A Doll's House, Royal Exchange (2013). Ibsen in the round loses none of its power to cast a spell

Public Enemy, Young Vic (2013). The horrors of local politics still chime in Richard Jones's queasy production of an Ibsen masterpiece

Ghosts, Almeida Theatre (2013). Richard Eyre and Lesley Manville shine light into Ibsen's dark thriller of family misfortunes

Peer Gynt, Théâtre National de Nice (2014). Irina Brook's song-and-dance Ibsen entertains, but misses the darker shades

The Wild Duck, Belvoir Sydney (2014). Heartbreaking adaptation mixes naturalism and forensic examination

Little Eyolf, Almeida Theatre (2015). Strong women and one weak man in Ibsen's swift study of isolation and guilt

The Master Builder, Old Vic (2016). Ralph Fiennes stars in Ibsen's unsettling mix of the real and the supernatural

Hedda Gabler, National Theatre (2016). Ivo van Hove makes an uneven Southbank debut

OVERLEAF: GEMMA ARTERTON ON STAGE AND SCREEN