What coronaries, kittens and caterwauling tantrums one would have ? doubtless simultaneously ? if one could eavesdrop on a political party's HQ when it was awash with bad faith at manifesto-writing time. So it says a lot for Tom Basden's play-making skills that he has managed to concoct a charmingly funny comedy about the process. We're not talking David Hare here. Basden's satire is gentle and oblique and it derives its beguiling mix of acuity and tactical daffiness from the fact that, far from being professional politicians in Millbank, the five twentysomethings whom we follow through 70 minutes of inconclusive bickering are incompetents hard put to come up with a name for their organisation, let alone any mutually agreed policies beyond "democracy" and "space programme".

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Simon Russell Beale made his reputation, over twenty years ago, playing egregious Restoration fops at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He now returns, in a blaze of comic glory, to this effeminate breed in Nicholas Hytner's deliriously funny revival of London Assurance. This is the play with which Dion Boucicault, the young, gifted, and dodgy Irishman, future bigamist and gainer and loser of fortunes earned his spurs on the London stage at the age of 21 in 1841.

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Dance 3 promotes new choreographers. The aim is to get the next generation of dancemakers seen around the country, while developing the small-scale touring circuit for dance. For this tour, programmers and promoters of the National Dance Network have picked their rising talent, presenting nine works across three triple bills. The programme I saw had varied approaches and strong dancing.

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A beautiful, shifty young man blows the dust off an artificial flower. He tells the young girl that she should have real blooms in her boudoir and that he will bring her some, but then his voice trails away. What he can't reveal is that he is about to fight a duel over a married woman with whom he's also been idly dallying. Unlike her more realistic female friend, the girl has family reasons for needing a romantic ideal and dreams of escape. The youth not entirely insincere, but he's a poor bet. Not that there would be many bona fide candidates, for this is Vienna at the brink of the 20th century and it's a world of fraught, half-frank sexual hang-ups, rising militarism, and the kind of liberation for women that allows them to trail allure, provided that the trail is just the continuation of chains by other means.

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At the annual St Giles' Fair in Oxford, there used to a Big Wheel. I could never get enough of this attraction, because here was a magical machine that bore you to the top of its circuit and then gave you a snatched, rapturous view of the dreaming spires (viewed over a college roofscape) just before it made your insides turn a somersault as it plunged you back down again.

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We've had death threats," says the Finborough's artistic director, Neil McPherson, cheerily about the theatre's new play, A Day at the Racists. "Emails, the odd letter, that sort of thing." He's not alone. Over at Rich Mix, in east London, theatre company Supporting Wall are fielding website invective seemingly on a near daily basis for their production of Philip Ridley's new play, Moonfleece. One website posting described the producers as "Nazis", while a recent newspaper interview with Ridley attracted online comments attacking a "liberal press monopoly" and a government that "doesn't care about indigenous working classes".

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It's not often that the standard pre-show announcement to switch off mobile phones and resist using cameras causes the audience to jump out of its collective skin. But Ghost Stories takes care to put the frighteners on the public well before the lights go down. The publicity blatantly advises people of a nervous disposition or women in the later stages of pregnancy to stay away. One senses that there might be a spoof element to this, as well as a canny reverse come-on, but one can't be sure. This critic ? who even screamed as a child during the movie of The Sound of Music on discovering that that nice blonde messenger-boy had become a Nazi ? toyed with the idea of securing a sick note from his doctors. I'm glad that I didn't because Ghost Stories, though lethally well-paced in its visceral scariness, proved to be more a fascinating think-piece ? as technically dazzling as it is morally teasing ? than the stuff of ongoing future nightmares.

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British choreographer Richard Alston has a wonderful group of dancers: speedy, fluent, musical. For all their accomplishment, this company sometimes need more punch on stage. Alston's new production of Movements from Petrushka is swirling and stylish, but misses the tension at the heart of this story.

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You don't have to be old to play King Lear but it helps. The late, great Eric Porter first played it when he was 26. Greg Hicks is no spring chicken, but he's no ancient of days, either. This extraordinary actor, who seems exclusively devoted to the heroic stage, simply plays a barbaric monarch who has defied old age by embracing his own tragic fate.

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Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen display an onstage chemistry that works like a volatile charm in Richard Eyre's exhilaratingly funny, expertly orchestrated and wittily designed revival of the Noël Coward comedy classic Private Lives.

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Framed in gold, the scene is like a religious icon, only one that exalts deluxe hedonism. Lolling in silk dressing gowns on a huge velvet ottoman, Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen are the old flames, Amanda and Elyot, in Noël Coward's comedy Private Lives. "Wow!" breathed the woman behind me, readily seduced as the curtain rose on this gilded vision in Act II of Richard Eyre's new West End staging.

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Cubania ? say it with the accent on the "i" and you're halfway there ? is the word Cubans use to describe their particular sunny-island outlook, their Cuban-ness.

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Jerry Springer the Opera famously inflamed Christians to most un-Christian thoughts of censorship and worse. Cat-calling protesters marched with placards outside the fringe theatre that hosted the London premiere of Corpus Christi, the Terrence McNally play that dared to suggest that the God of love might just as well have been gay as straight or sexless. Not, though, that Christians have the monopoly on illiberal outrage. Some members of the Sikh community were so affronted by the play Behzti at the Birmingham Rep that violence broke out among a minority of the protesters and performances of the play were cancelled two days later.

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Their ages are like palindromes (she's 53; he's 35). She was brought up in Canada; he was reared in Blighty. Their professional backgrounds are not exactly congruent. She's broadly from film and TV (most notably Sex and the City); before Spooks and Pride and Prejudice, he had served an apprenticeship in classical theatre. But Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen display an onstage chemistry that works like a volatile charm in Richard Eyre's exhilaratingly funny revival of the Noel Coward comedy classic, Private Lives.

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In Ed Hughes's tango Romeo and Juliet, one of the musicians is caught weeping after Juliet drinks the potion. Pulling himself together ? after all, she's not really dead ? he beats out a new rhythm, leading the Astillero tango orchestra in a gleeful number. The music stops when Juliet is discovered, her family's grief taking over.

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Even by the standards of soap-opera weddings, Susan Dalston's is a notable one. As her mother shrieks about effing this and that, the pregnant bride's father and her fiancé, Barry, arrive at the church late, high-spirited and dishevelled. After vows are exchanged, Susan falls as Barry grabs her bottom, and dad, thinking he has pushed her, starts a punch-up. The priest, a braver man than any of the local publicans (Barry and dad are extortionists), chucks them out and says they're banned. The ceremony is a model of decorum next to the reception.

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In the wildly funny and piercingly poignant The Dead School, an expressionistically dilapidated classroom in a Catholic school in Ireland ? or rather a morbid, ramshackle version of it that's been reconstructed in the home of a mad former master ? becomes the site for a freewheeling phantasmagoria in which the intertwined fates of two schoolteachers of different generations are resurrected and subjected to a blackly exuberant autopsy.

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In Sam Mendes' stripped-back new production of The Tempest, Prospero's island is a bare circle of sand.

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In many people's minds, ballet is defined by three Ts: tradition, tutus and ticket price.

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