How has The Alchemist remained funny, slick and bang-on social target for four hundred years? Well imaginative productions like this one directed by Polly Findlay certainly help burnish its reputation. Essentially, however, Ben Jonson’s play will continue to be comic gold, as long as there are greedy, lustful and gullible people in the world.

Here is some of the best of Shakespeare’s late poetry, and in Innogen one of his finest female characters. And if the final act resolves more confusions and coincidences than six Dickens’ novels, it transmits an end glow of love, reconciliation and forgiveness which is truly cathartic . . . Here is some of the best of Shakespeare’s late poetry, and in Innogen one of his finest female characters.

The RSC’s new Hamlet is patently original. Gone are the cliché blond Nordic tresses so favoured by Olivier and others, gone are the wind-swept rocky battlements of Elsinore and in are the brightly coloured Afro fabrics and jungle drums of medieval Denmark’s first black royal family . . . I really liked Cyril Ni as the obsequious Polonius, always eager to please and smooth the troubled waters but, to my mind, the best performance came from Natalie Simpson as his daughter Ophelia.

The present – whatever the truth – is always seen as a grossly lacking, cynical, depressing and ignoble era. So why not simply ignore reality, pick a supposed golden age and dream-shift into it?
That’s the plot of Cervantes’ 400 year old classic novel: Don Quixote. And at its best this stage version by James Fenton, shows why that idea continues to resonate with meaning and amusement.

Twenty-four years fly by hellishly fast when they’re leading to a date with eternal damnation. That’s director Maria Aberg’s 105 minute, interval-less, zoom-through of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. And hellish it is. Blood-stirringly and entertainingly hellish that is, full of quirky vitality and bizarre imagination. It is also on occasion confusing and distanced from Marlowe’s Renaissance questioning about science’s challenge to God.