Festive theatrical feasts serve audiences a slap-up dinner with their entertainment. But is what’s on stage as appetising as what’s on your plate?

In west London, a line of smartly dressed theatregoers on a street corner enter a building and walk back in time. We pass through tight lamp-lit corridors and arrive in a cavernous hall, with tables laid and lanterns dangling overhead. This is Charles Dickens’ parlour, where he has just finished writing A Christmas Carol, and it’s dinner time.

The Great Christmas Feast is an immersive production in which a three-course meal is served while a quicksilver Dickens (David Alwyn) narrates his ghost story about the perils of penny-pinching in the season of goodwill. Immersive theatre has evidently concocted a tasty festive offshoot that might suit those tired of watching yet another straight-up adaptation of the classic tale.

Lyttelton theatre, London
Coughlan plays a barmaid, alongside Derry Girls co-star Siobhán McSweeney, in JM Synge’s 1907 classic

Every woman loves a bad boy, or so the cliche goes. Here it is tested when Christy Mahon walks into a pub to confess he has killed his father with a farming tool. It’s not quite the truth but he is, to his own surprise, turned into a local celebrity. Women flock to see him and men hail him a hero.

John Millington Synge’s unromanticised comic portrayal of a farming community in the west of Ireland caused moral outrage at its 1907 premiere at Dublin’s Abbey theatre. This revival by the Abbey’s current artistic director, Caitríona McLaughlin, makes clear that it is something of a woman’s play, ahead of its time, with two female leads abjuring conservative Catholic morality to hope for something bigger than a small, scratching country existence.

Bridge theatre, London
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s fairytale adventure follows its archetypal characters into real-world emotion, brilliantly drawn and sung

Can Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s eternally imaginative Grimm brothers mashup ever disappoint, when its book is so clever and it is driven by the most gorgeous (if tricky) music? Jordan Fein’s production shimmers and shines with all the humour and pathos of these errant fairytale characters who misadventure into the woods, winding their rearranged stories around each other.

The show begins with swift efficiency, racing through some of the early songs, but it gathers feeling and there is picaresque fun. A witch’s curse inflicted on the Baker (Jamie Parker) and his wife (Katie Brayben) for the sins of his father can only be broken if they bring her Cinderella’s shoe, Rapunzel’s golden hair, Red Ridinghood’s coat and the milky white cow so dear to Jack (of the beanstalk).

Young Vic theatre, London
A powerful blend of mixed reality, testimony and theatre exposes the human toll of benefit cuts – and asks what justice looks like in a new political era

David Cameron did not just leave us the gift of Brexit before fleeing his premiership. There is also the toxic legacy of his “age of austerity” policies. Here is an excoriating production that examines what austerity meant for those targeted by it. They include some of the most vulnerable members of society – people who were abused, destitute, disabled, mentally ill and jobless (what was it that Pearl Buck said about the test of a civilisation?).

The show is based on the lives of people who were denied welfare benefits and died. Directed by Sacha Wares, it is an installation that combines promenade theatre with holograms. Wearing a mixed-reality (MR) headset, you enter a room where eight static figures emerge, played by actors. They lie on gurneys, bare mattresses, park benches, pavements and soiled duvets, and make for a woeful army of “invisibles” who have, for this time, come into our line of vision. We hear their stories, told by relatives (interviews co-edited by Wares and special advisor John Pring) and the accounts bring tears to your eyes.

Young Vic theatre, London
Rajiv Joseph’s tale of a captive animal that returns from the dead after the 2003 invasion is bracingly unconventional

There is an exciting wildness to the European premiere of Rajiv Joseph’s surreal black comedy about the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Firstly, an animal is played on stage, a tiger shot in a Baghdad zoo that returns from the dead to haunt the US marine who pulled the trigger. Secondly, it talks. Wisecracks, in fact, and interrogates the existence of God. A twisted version of Life of Pi? Certainly it’s less of a dream than a nightmare in which anything could happen.

And things do lurch from one thing to another with illogical effect. To add to the frisson of unpredictability, Kathryn Hunter performs as the tiger after David Threlfall bowed out, until further notice, due to illness. The part was played on Broadway in 2011 by Robin Williams but Hunter brings her own comic swagger.