At first glance, verbatim theatre is a total bore. This form of drama, which collects the words spoken by real individuals and puts them into the mouths of actors, has been a central plank of the rebirth of political theatre since 9/11, but its pleasures tend to be cerebral rather than visceral, moral rather than physical. Attending a verbatim theatre event - such as Out Of Joint's latest show, Mixed Up North - usually makes you feel good as a citizen rather than as a person. You feel worthy, but don’t usually have much fun.

Don't be put off by the deliberately dim interior that first greets you at Mrs Klein, the Nicholas Wright play that has been scorchingly revived at the Almeida Theatre by the director Thea  Sharrock and a cast including Clare Higgins in her third stand-out performance on the London stage this year. Those who feel as if they've had enough theatrical psychiatry-speak from the Almeida courtesy of that venue's recent revival of Duet For One, think again: a play that can emerge (and has) as too portentous by half reappears with a wry spring in its step and an emotional sting that is sure to land, whether or not you have spent time on the proverbial couch.

Dateline: Vienna, 1923. In a boarding house, seven young people - most of whom are medical students - find the air of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire’s capital city a heady mix of the sexually invigorating and the morally asphyxiating. At the opening last night of Ferdinand Bruckner's rarely performed play, Pains of Youth, there were moments when the event felt as if Egon Schiele was meeting Sigmund Freud at a madhouse performance of La Ronde.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company asked Roy Williams to write something with Much Ado About Nothing as his inspiration, he didn’t merely update the romantic comedy. Rather he took some characters and plotlines and cleverly wove them into Days of Significance, a shocking and powerful play about the Iraq war, which was staged at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2007. This touring version, which I saw at Northern Stage in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, has some of the original cast and is again directed by Maria Aberg in a thrilling, visceral production.

Family life can be bad for your health. Especially if you are an overweight teenager. Take Anna for example. She's 15, a bit on the plump side, and having a rough time. At school, where - horror of horrors - her Mum is a teacher, she's attracted the attention of some bullies. But worse than unwelcome attention is neglect: her Dad is too busy writing a book about saving the planet from climate change to pay much attention to his daughter, or his wife. But help is on its way. 

It’s a big ask for any performer to take on a role that was written specially for another actor, but Diana Vickers’ supporters from her appearances in last year’s X Factor on ITV will be pleased to learn that she acquits herself very well indeed. She is Little Voice in Terry Johnson’s pleasing revival of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which began life in the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1992 with Jane Horrocks in the title role.

What, you mean you didn't know that Annie Oakley, the American sharpshooter whose career hit its stride in the 1880s, was honoured by Winston Churchill but had no use for Adolf Hitler? Then you've been spending too little time in the ever-eccentric world of the maverick director Richard Jones, whose Young Vic revival of Annie Get Your Gun, the 1946 Broadway musical classic, is about as anti-Broadway as a staging can get.

Beckett is less forbidding now than he might have seemed when he was alive, and certainly when his work was first performed. Over the last two decades, crueller and darker plays than his have been written, though none have matched his lyric ingenuity and his pained, sometimes devastating irony remains unsurpassed. Can Endgame, the bleak successor to Waiting for Godot and perhaps the oddest dramatic masterpiece of the 20th century, still hurt us? And what, I feel it legitimate to ask, might lie behind a desire to revive it in the West End?