Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut stars the 96-year-old June Squibb, while Netflix’s lovable tweefest sees its heroine move to Rome

Eleanor the Great
Out now
June Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, which premiered at Cannes and tells the tale of the eponymous Eleanor, a senior citizen recently relocated to New York, who strikes up a friendship with a 19-year old – and then stumbles her way into pretending to be a Holocaust survivor.

Lurker
Out now
A hit at Sundance, this is the story of a lowly retail employee who happens to strike up a friendship with a rising pop star, becoming the Boswell to his Johnson, if Boswell was part of a pop star’s entourage. But the path of friendship with a famous person never did run smooth, and the uneven power dynamic soon prompts some desperate manoeuvring in this psychological thriller.

Ella McCay
Out now
Emma Mackey stars in the latest from James L Brooks (his first since 2010), a political comedy about an idealistic thirtysomething working in government and preparing to step into the shoes of her mentor, Governor Bill (Albert Brooks). Jamie Lee Curtis co-stars as Ella’s aunt.

The writer’s former partner and her co-star Ruby Ashbourne Serkis describe the bittersweet nature of remounting his 90s play so soon after his death

• ‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

I won’t, I promise, refer to Felicity Kendal as Tom Stoppard’s muse. “No,” she says firmly. “Not this week.” Speaking to Stoppard’s former partner and longtime leading lady is delicate in the immediate aftermath of the writer’s death. But she is previewing a revival of his Indian Ink, so he shimmers through the conversation. The way Kendal refers to Stoppard in the present tense tells its own poignant story.

Settling into a squishy brown sofa at Hampstead theatre, Kendal describes revisiting the 1995 work, developed from a 1991 radio play. “It’s a play that I always thought I’d like to go back to.” Previously starring as Flora Crewe, a provocative British poet visiting 1930s India, she now plays Eleanor Swan, Flora’s sister. We meet Eleanor in the 1980s, fending off an intrusive biographer but uncovering her sister’s rapt and nuanced relationships in India.

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.

Inspired by the scary film franchise, playwright Levi Holloway and Punchdrunk maestro Felix Barrett are bringing the ‘bizarrely joyous’ world of terror to the stage

Malevolent spirits be damned – theatres can be haunted simply by the memory of bad plays and perhaps unscary horror in particular. The last time London’s Ambassadors theatre aimed to give audiences the shivers, with The Enfield Haunting, it led to some frightfully poor reviews. But a couple of years later, this intimate West End playhouse is hosting Paranormal Activity, a new instalment in the franchise that was kickstarted by a low-budget supernatural movie about a couple plagued by inexplicable nocturnal noises. “Hold your nerve” runs the play’s tagline – a directive you suspect applies not just to the audience.

Arriving at the theatre on the day of the first preview, it’s not creepy bumps and thuds that echo through the building but whizzing drills, sound checks and the last-minute discussions of a crew with a deadline. Perched in the dress circle bar, US playwright Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett (best known as the founder of immersive theatre specialists Punchdrunk) are discussing how rarely they have been frightened in the theatre.

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).

Bristol Old Vic
An inventive production crammed full of puppets, sword fights and rousing melodies shrieks with life

It’s all aboard this Christmas with Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary’s musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, starting at a storytelling festival in a Bristol pub. Comedian Jayde Adams, as the landlady, welcomes us with the familiar jesting of her standup sets: “Alright, let’s get to know the room …” Eventually, the tale takes hold and time zips back to the 18th century, where bright-eyed, 13-year-old Jim Hawkins, reimagined here as a girl and played by Adryne Caulder-James, dreams of following in her late father’s footsteps and setting sail.

Luckily for her, that’s the way the story goes. Jim assembles a motley crew of sailors to search for the treasure once hidden by notorious pirate Captain Flint. Unbeknownst to them, they are joined on the ship by Long John Silver (a cackling Colin Leggo) and his evil posse, desperate to steal the gold for themselves. This sets the stage for an adventure crammed full of double bluffs, backstabbing and swashbuckling sword fights.

Norwich Theatre Royal
There are eye-popping designs, playful puns and musical flourishes as Joe Tracini’s story unfolds on its own madcap shoreline

Here is a sun-kissed panto to dispel any dreams of a white Christmas. Joe Tracini’s script is set in the seaside town of Crabbington Sands where a pastel-dressed ensemble make merry with Aimee Leigh’s breezy choreography. Cinderella’s sisters, gruesome twosome Lou and Lav (cue toilet-flush effect), could have stepped out of an outrageously saucy postcard. Designer Kirsteen Wythe gifts them lurid costumes best seen with UV protection. They include a beach ball-shaped dress, a bucket-and-spade hat, fairground-ride frocks and wigs seemingly woven with fishing rope.

Cinderella’s parents ran a local hotel that has been shuttered since she lost them, and she yearns for new adventures, a longing captured in an opening rendition of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten. In the lead role, Georgia May Foote brings a big sister vibe to her crowdwork with the young audience that also underlines how Cinders sees the hopelessly devoted Buttons (Tracini) as a brother. But she is written to be a bit insipid, and there is little spark to her romance with a wannabe rock-star prince (Danny Hatchard, poised between buffoon and decent bloke).

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.

Director, actor and a co-founder of Monstrous Regiment, whose work would concentrate on women’s experience

In 1975 the stage director Susan Todd, who has died aged 83, teamed up with the actors Gillian Hanna and Mary McCusker to form Monstrous Regiment, a national touring company that would always have a majority of women members, and whose work would explore the experience of women, past and present.

Taking their title from the Scottish fundamentalist John Knox’s notorious treatise The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, the company started with Claire Luckham’s Paris commune-set Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Washing (1976); the following year came Caryl Churchill’s witchcraft play Vinegar Tom. Todd herself wrote Kiss and Kill (with Ann Mitchell) about domestic violence (1977-78), and – in 1979 – collaborated with me on the company’s first play involving a male writer, bringing the worlds of student revolution and schoolgirl romance into crashing contradiction, in Teendreams. As in all of the early Monstrous Regiment shows, Todd was also a member of the acting company.

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.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
This adaptation of the beloved tale about an ogre looks beautiful but does not grow into a giant to rival the company’s hit Roald Dahl musical

The Royal Shakespeare Company is named for its house dramatist but – since its global hit Matilda: The Musical premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon 15 winters ago – Roald Dahl has helped keep it solvent enough to do Shakespeare. An adaptation of Dahl’s 1982 book about a counter-intuitive ogre who befriends an orphan is a hoped-for Christmas gift to the coffers of an organisation making budget-trimming job cuts.

But, where Matilda was always confidently a comedy musical, The BFG feels stylistically to be juggling different shows. Adapted by Tom Wells with additional material from dramaturg Jenny Worton, the show has a strand of spoken drama, somewhat reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, with a quasi-Elizabeth II, sweetly played by Helena Lymbery, saving the nation with child superhero helpers.

Park theatre, London
Gleefully leaning into all the cliches and groansome laughs, Dan Patterson and Jez Bond’s musical vampire romp is supremely silly

If ever there was a show where the title came first, you’d guess it was this one by Dan (Whose Line Is It Anyway?) Patterson and Jez Bond. Why else, if not to justify a pun, would you make an a capella singing version of the Victorian vampire novel? And Dracapella is nothing if not fond of a pun. (“There is a supernatural force at work in Transylvania.” / “Which is?” / “No, not witches.”) There’s lots more where that came from in this spooky comedy romp, in which an undead Romanian count concludes his 400-year search for love to a soundtrack of closely harmonised 80s power ballads and champion beatboxing.

The latter is all provided by ABH Beatbox, a cast member of the BAC Beatbox Academy’s Frankenstein, in whose globetrotting success I discern another (distant) inspiration for this music-gothic crossover. This one’s a more traditional affair, a knowing entertainment forever sending up its own storytelling cliches, and at every turn choosing groansome laughs over thrills. Arguably it lowers the stakes (it’s catching!) when a story about centuries-spanning passion becomes a vehicle for The Play What I Wrote-style larks. But the relentless silliness of Patterson and Bond’s confection amply compensates, as Harker’s train to Dover is decanted on to a rail replacement bus, and Dracula demonstrates his metaphysical powers by having his henchman consume – as if by magic! – a bowlful of marshmallows.

The Emily in Paris actor and writer of the Tony-nominated Slave Play remains in Japan while prosecutors investigate the alleged discovery of MDMA in his bag

The American playwright and Emily in Paris actor Jeremy O Harris has been released three weeks after his arrest in Japan on suspicion of drug smuggling while prosecutors investigate, police said Wednesday.

Japan has some of the world’s strictest drug laws, and possession of illegal narcotics can result in jail time. Prosecutors also have a very high conviction rate.

York Theatre Royal
Paul Hendy’s panto includes some silly surprises, well-handled audience interaction and a twinkling dame

Anyone remember the bit in Sleeping Beauty with the velociraptor named Kevin? Me neither. But an incongruous dinosaur sidekick is just one of the wonderfully silly additions to this take on the fairytale, along with a daft classroom routine, some capering ghouls and a regiment of toy soldiers come to life.

Now in the fifth year of its current formula, helmed by panto veteran Paul Hendy as writer-producer, the York Theatre Royal’s festive offering feels solidly bedded in. It’s reliably crowd-pleasing and family-friendly, with a string of familiar set pieces to delight those who come back year after year. We know there will be the slop scene, the ghost bench, the pun-packed comedy routine, the pre-interval spectacle. Part of the joy is in waiting for these moments and wondering what new twist will be put on them.

Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores, London
This gentle and generous piece of immersive theatre combines captivating storytelling with moments of wonder

We’re on our way to see Fireside Tales and my five-year-old son, Benji, is full of questions. Will the fire be real? Where will we sit? Luckily, it doesn’t take long for Benji’s anxiety to settle. Punchdrunk Enrichment’s new show has, like its predecessors, been created with schools, communities and children in mind. It’s a gentle and generous piece of immersive theatre – one that often, quite literally, takes the children by their hands and invites them to become part of the story.

To start off, we’re invited to browse the “bookstore”, crammed full of intriguing trinkets to touch and play with. Anxiety quelled and curiosity piqued, it’s time to enter the Punchdrunk Enrichment store where the show proper begins. And what a store it is, designed with immaculate attention to detail by Mydd Pharo. The shelves spill over with quirky objects; clusters of feathers, boxes of globes, bundles of photos, twinkling lava lamps and dusty typewriters.

The Bridge theatre in London presents Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s classic this Christmas. Take a closer look – and revisit past revivals

Until she reached her 50s, the actor was a constant presence on stage and screen. Then the offers disappeared. Now, as her renaissance continues, she is taking on Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals

After six decades as an actor, Patricia Hodge says she still gets nervous before a play opens. “I think nerves are always the fear of the unknown,” she says. “Particularly with comedy, where there is no knowing how the audience will react: you’ve got to surf that.”

We meet on a sunny winter morning at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, south-west London, where Hodge is about to appear in The Rivals, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Richard B Sheridan play, in which she plays the ironic – sorry, iconic – Mrs Malaprop. “You’re sort of in a tunnel, your entire being is focused on this,” she says. She was here in rehearsals until 11pm the night before. Today, she is sitting at a table with a large coffee. Does she enjoy this bit, the putting together of a play? “I think it’s love-hate actually. The process is really why I do theatre.” She says she finds it energising, “but it’s also very trying, and you just don’t want to be left with your own limitations”.