When The History Boys was first performed at the National Theatre in 2004 the reverential cupping of a sixth former's genitals by an appreciative retirement-age teacher was enough to elicit ceaseless gales of laughter. Today it is more likely to form the basis of an investigation by detectives from the public protection division.

Shameless star David Threlfall has landed a role as the late comic Tommy Cooper - just like that.

Amy Herzog's play has travelled, well, nearly 4,000 miles: it premièred in New York in 2011 – winning its young author an Obie – while in the UK it opened at the Ustinov Studio in Bath, directed by James Dacre, earlier this year. 

It was always going to be a tall order bringing Khaled Hosseini’s mega-selling 2003 novel about friendship, betrayal and exile to the stage.

The only sin Scout Finch, the eight-year-old narrator of Harper Lee’s classic novel, has ever heard her lawyer father denounce was to kill a mockingbird; they do nothing but make music for us to enjoy.

Table Manners is a triple bill inspired by that most genteel of gatherings: the dinner party. But this is no cosy, bring-a-bottle, one-pot-on-the-scrubbed-kitchen-table affair. Rather it is a “trip to the end of etiquette”, courtesy of three young groups of theatre-makers who see gathering friends for a bite to eat as the excuse for some very bad behaviour indeed.

One of the main attractions of this year’s Brighton Festival is a night-time traipse around Preston Manor, a gorgeous historic house in the suburbs which was bequeathed to the city by the Stanford family in 1932.

Some stars become famous far beyond their own fields. You don't need to be interested in running to know about Usain Bolt; you don’t need to be interested in dance to have heard of French ballerina Sylvie Guillem. In both cases, the fame comes from something beyond their undoubted skill. It’s about charisma, the personality that shines through the technique.

When Dominic Cooke took over at the Royal Court, he said he wanted to stage more plays about “what it means to be middle class”. Now, as the reins of artistic director pass to Vicky Featherstone, comes possibly the most middle-class play of his era - and very funny on the topic it is too.

You can't fault Northern Ballet for timing, as its new stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby drops on London the same week as Baz Luhrmann's film remake is shown in Cannes. The first night even mustered a red carpet and a posse of paparazzi at the door. But what works on stage is not what works on screen. There can be no panoramic camerawork to establish Jay Gatsby's palatial estate, no text with which to convey "the exhilarating ripple" of Daisy Buchanan's voice. What's more, the characters must identify themselves without being named. So, it's a credit to David Nixon as both director and choreographer that he not only succeeds in telling the story clearly, and pacily, but with a depth of visual detail that sends you scurrying back to F Scott Fitzgerald's prose to verify the exact descriptive phrase. And it's all there. For once, no one goes home muttering "that's not how I remember the book".

Ibsen's updated 'An Enemy of the People' is neatly transported to the Sixties but doesn't quite go with a swing

An informative and witty account of anorexia that constantly prods away at the strangeness of its subject matter

The new Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, is a spanking new five-star neighbourhood theatre opening with a three-star play about girls in a 1920s Chicago watch-making factory who are gradually alerted (though not by the bosses) to the dangers of radium in the illuminated dials when one of them becomes seriously ill.

Thomas Eccleshare’s first play won the 2011 Verity Bargate award, so named in honour of the Soho’s founding co-director, and it arrives in London from a season at the High Tide Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk (where I saw it), full of bleak poetry and hilarious stage action.

A tale of corruption, greed and the responsibility of the press, states the Young Vic's publicity, and you can't say fairer than that. Ibsen's perennially pertinent dissection of spa town fall-out after the chief medical officer, Doctor Stockmann, undermines the tourist industry by pointing out that the water is contaminated, never fails.