I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, suggesting a rich theatricality to come. And so in Ivona it proves in some aspects, if not in others.

The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and tribulations of these worker ants.

Vienna has its New Year's Day concert, conducted this year with some style but not quite enough sensuousness by Franz Welser-Möst. London could do worse for a more modest equivalent than let the Wooden O play host to a well-spiced small package of carols, seasonal songs and readings from Chaucer's times to Thomas Hardy's. But sing and play it lustily, ye Gabrieli ladies and gentlemen, or not at all. And it's sad to report that the proceedings got off to a start as soggy as the winter's afternoon they were supposed to keep at bay.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained? The fact that my eyes pricked as the two lovers launched into the dance-song celebrating their magic piano may partly be ascribed to nostalgia for teenage am-dram - late Seventies, not early Fifties - but much more to the airy lack of irony in Tête à Tête's deliciously classical production.

A night when a fresh fall of snow was fluttering from the heavens could hardly have felt more fitting for the opening of this Shakespearean romance – particularly since David Farr’s production for the RSC, first seen in Stratford in 2009, so felicitously counters fire with ice. Cruelty and rage, the willful closing off of the heart, the reawakening of hope and the resurrection of enduring love: passion both kills and sustains in the worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia; and if the staging sometimes seems slightly ponderous, it delivers moments of arresting intensity.

London is a magical place at this time of year - so many streets with their individual lighting schemes and colours, and nowhere I think is lovelier than the new-look Southbank Centre, where from the side of the Festival Hall swings a spacious canopy of silver-blue trickles reflected in the glass of the new cafés alongside, a captivating, super-chic Thames-side installation. Into this urban grotto last night Kneehigh Theatre’s bouncy, folksy Hansel and Gretel came as welcome as a homemade mince pie.

Once upon a time there was a free spirit called Tim, who fell in love with olde folk tales and created little shows all about spells and wonders, and peopled them with princes and princesses, farmers and animals. When he was more grown up, he formed a gang with another free spirit and then with a lady known as the Poet Laureate, who came from a cold, snow-covered country in the North. Then the three of them created a bigger show and staged it in a city called Bristol in the West of England several years ago. Then finally they brought this show, which had grown and grown, to the chief city of the kingdom.

Most critics have their own indicator of shows they have enjoyed hugely; for my part, if I fail to take anything but the most basic notes it’s because I’m so engrossed in the story or I’m laughing too much. And so it proved last night, when I found only hastily scribbled words - great this, wonderful that - in my notebook, enough to tell me that Richard Eyre's production of Georges Feydeau's 1907 farce A Flea in Her Ear is a hoot.

Incongruence is always interesting, so the news earlier this year that Anthony Neilson, bad-boy author of adult plays such as Penetrator, The Censor and The Wonderful World of Dissocia, was penning a Christmas play — suitable for kids — at the Royal Court came as something of a delightful surprise. It was also clearly a chance to make amends for The Lying Kind, his 2002 seasonal venture at this address, which received what are politely called mixed reviews. This time, it's good to be able to report that his new festive comedy, which opened last night amid gales of laughter, proves that he has returned to top form.

Via the Chichester Festival and acclaimed runs on Broadway and in the West End, director Rupert Goold's Macbeth has made a sizzling transition to television. Set in an anarchic, war-torn Scotland and suffused with imagery of murder, torture and Stalin-style purges, it placed Patrick Stewart's thunderous central performance in a spinning black hole of evil, into which he was remorselessly sucked as the action developed.