Monks from China’s Shaolin Temple stand perched on tall wooden boxes. Swaying from side to side, they rock the crates until they fall, leaping free at the last moment. Famous for their warrior skills, in Sutra the monks are both movers and pieces in a puzzle, setting up patterns or standing inside the boxes as they fall like dominoes.

The first memory which might be stirred by this complicated but ultimately gripping psychothriller about truth and perspective from rising star Rob Drummond is a faded one of evenings watching garishly designed quiz shows on a four-channel television in the 1980s.

Can you say of a face that it is “bunched” with artless merriment in the way that a fist can be said to be bunched in anger or frustration? You'd swear that that perception was permissible if you'd seen the concertedly beaming countenance of Dorothy Duffy as she sits and gently rocks on the rope swing that hangs from a barren tree Abigail Graham's astonishingly well-acted and quietly devastating revival of Molly Sweeney at the Print Room.

Laurencia, which continues the Mikhailovsky Ballet’s London season, is a curious hybrid. The Spanish dances, castanets and local colour suggest the exotic ballets of the 19th century, with the addition of a Soviet-friendly tale of a peasant uprising. Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev make sensational rebel leaders, drawing the mix together.

Natalia Osipova suddenly launches herself sideways, sailing through the air to land in the arms of Ivan Vasiliev, half a stage away. The Mikhailovsky Ballet’s Don Quixote is full of impossible feats, performed with swaggering charm.

Sheer, spiky bliss

The children who inspired two classics meet as adults, but find themselves stuck for words

You dodge the violent politics of Russian ballet only to end up in a chocolate-box 'Giselle'. Never mind, just jump for joy

There were moments, during the three hour slog through The Low Road, when I found myself thinking that I would rather tak' any road than have to watch it again.

David Farr's new take on Hamlet takes place in what looks like the fencing gym of a run-down public school.

Even before she becomes a ghost, Natalia Osipova’s Giselle defies gravity. Running out from her rustic cottage, she hangs in the air with each glowing, skipping step. Osipova and her partner Ivan Vasiliev, two of the world’s most exciting dancers, headline a busy London season by the Mikhailovsky Ballet, a St Petersburg company whose international profile has soared in recent years.

The American Plan is bit like a hyper-literate variant of Henry James's novella Washington Square, but this play by Richard Three Days of Rain Greenberg boasts its own splendidly astringent wit and pervasive sense of secrets and sadness and stymied hope.

Peter and Alice seemed to have everything going for it. It marks the reunion of director Michael Grandage and the three-times Oscar-nominated author, John Logan, with whom he had such a success on both sides of the Atlantic with Red, the latter's play about Mark Rothko. It mouthwateringly deposits Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw on the same stage (on screen, they have appeared together as M and Q and in the Logan-scripted Skyfall). And, last but not least, the play kicks off from a premise that yammers with potential.

It's a case of Bart – as well as Bats –  in the Belfry in Quasimodo.

At the dog-end of a British winter, there's nothing so welcome as a blast of Spain. Sadler's Wells clocked this 10 years ago when it scheduled its first annual flamenco fortnight, a table of tapas showcasing the expanding range of flavours offered by the newly revived artform.