Shakespeare’s protagonist is reimagined as a conductor in Richard Eyre’s accomplished, quaintly magical staging

A superbly directed community cast carry Rory Mullarkey’s witty portrait of a city shaped by violence, resilience and reinvention

Alexandra Wood reimagines Hilary Mantel’s controversial tale as a ludicrous, playfully subversive two-hander

The actor writes and stars in this dramatisation of two men of extremes joined - separated - by grief

Philip Parr’s international event kicks off with a deeply moving, poetic puppet version of Romeo and Juliet by a Georgian theatre company

Zanib Mian’s children’s book and its zinging illustrations are brought to sharply coloured onstage life at Leeds Playhouse

Bob Eaton’s rock’n’roll musical about social change through the decades is a glorious trip down memory lane

Alfred Enoch is dynamic in a production that prioritises combat scenes over moral probing

Matthew Xia’s powerfully acted but uneven production retells Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel spanning colonial Jamaica and postwar Britain

A caper about the mystery of missing hotel staff is carried off by a multi-talented, multi-roling cast with joyous aplomb

Ava Pickett, the young playwright behind the Olivier-nominated 1536, reimagines AK Blakemore’s witchy historical novel in a punchy but patchy production

Easy Virtue at the Arts Theatre Cambridge skewers upper-middle-class morals with a witty, well-balanced cast

Oladipo Agboluaje’s reimagining of the Shakespeare tragedy is ambitious, finely crafted and occasionally confusing

Imitating the Dog transports the hero of HG Wells’s novel to 1960s London where paranoia and fascism is on the march

The city’s international festival is smaller and shorter than its summer siblings – but big on imagination

Theresa Heskins’s adaptation features beach parties and an Instagramming prince

The cast transport us to a world of pirates, sea voyages, talking parrots and singing coconuts – but the story lacks the fear factor of the Robert Louis Stevenson original

This adaptation daringly delivers the novel’s broad-brush humour and unsanctimonious message

Emma Rice’s imaginative production captures the joy, fear and melancholy yearning of the poet’s work

This lively but rambling new musical, with songs by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, follows Holmes and Watson as they solve the murders of the drummer, piper, lord, lady…