Few comedians are such good company that you never want them to stop. The young Billy Connolly was one such; affable American Mike Birbiglia is another. 

From the moment that the blood-stained Nathuram Godse rises out of the floor of the National Theatre's Olivier stage and demands ‘What are you staring at?

Playwright Polly Stenham MBE had a meteoric rise with this play, her award-winning 2007 debut which she wrote aged 19 and whose original Royal Court cast featured Lyndsay Duncan and Matt Smith, and earned a much-lauded West End transfer. I remember it as a punky and powerful in-yer-face experience so I’m not surprised to see it being revived, this time starring Niamh Cusack, at Tom Littler’s ever enterprising Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Lady Emma Hamilton (like so much in this woman's life, hers was a title achieved as much as bestowed) was the “It Girl” of European society.

There is a grainy piece of black and white film on YouTube featuring Noel Coward as the celebrity guest on a 1964 edition of the popular television panel show, What's My Line. He signs in with panache, paying careful attention to the diaeresis over the e in Noel and enveloping his first name with a stylish C from the second. Artifice, self-invention, elegance – these are qualities inseparable from the Coward reputation.

Yasmin Reza’s God of Carnage (2008), like her British megahit, 1994’s Art, is not strictly a comedy. The French dramatist likes to create gladiatorial spaces disguised as chic living-rooms, where the professional classes slug it out, chewing their way through all manner of pieties and prejudices to reach some kind of climactic end point.

To proclaim that you’re playing gender games with Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you have a bicycle with two wheels, or indeed that you’re doing something interesting with rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.

One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem with all the thrills and spills of an Indiana Jones outing, with added Olympians. The National’s version turned out not to be The Odyssey as we know it, though.  

CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★