One of the most resonant contemporary slogans is “Build bridges not walls”. Because it applies to the personal as well the political, it has the force of simplicity and directness. The way that building walls can be psychologically destructive, cutting a person off from emotional connection, is exemplified in Mancunian playwright Kit Withington’s new family play, Heart Wall, currently on the main stage at the Bush Theatre.

As a reviewer, if you’re lucky, you get a tingle down the spine – rarely, but you know it when you feel

The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.

It feels fitting that this latest revival of Copenhagen should open so soon after Arcadia at the Old Vic. These masterworks by, respectively, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have much in common, as highly sophisticated marriages of ideas, moral inquiry and human drama, wrapped in mystery.

Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell.

Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.

Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.

If ever there was a piece that epitomised the view that villains are infinitely more fun than heroes, it would be Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and its subsequent

After Barber Shop Chronicles comes a female slice of pan-African life, set in Harlem in July 2019, at the fag end of Donald J Trump’s first presidency. Playwright Jocelyn Bioh never mentions him by name, but his shadow looms over the lives of the braiders, all aiming to become US citizens.

At least, his shadow looms over them now. Bioh’s tweaking of the text for the London run has added topical plot points from the second Trump presidency to give this bouncy Tony-nominated comedy a real sting in its tail.

In its heyday, Rodney Ackland’s 1935 play The Old Ladies, adapted from a 1924 novel by Hugh Walpole, was a favourite with doyennes of the theatre world including Edith Evans, Flora Robson and Miriam Karlin. But it has languished unstaged in London for more than 30 years.