Best known for novels The Hundred and One Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith was also one of interwar Britain’s most successful dramatists. Julia Rank looks back at her career, ahead of the NT’s revival of Smith’s 1938 play Dear Octopus

Emily Brontë takes centre stage in melancholic new opera about literature’s most famous sisters

Judge John Deed stars Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove reunite in this talky three-hander about grief and loneliness from Simon Williams

Beth Flintoff presents a historical drama charting the life of this lesser-known monarch, staged in his final resting place

Shakespeare in the Squares takes to London’s prettiest gardens in this Jazz Age twist on the comedy

The V&A is tracing the history of the ‘diva’, from 19th-century opera singers to today’s global megastars – we find out more

Valentina Andrade, Elizabeth Alvarado, Lucy Wray and Tommy Ross-Williams challenge the lack of Latinx representation in the British media and popular culture in this heist thriller

The HandleBards’ likeably scrappy outdoor production, directed by Nel Crouch, is performed by a high-octane cast of four: George Attwell Gerhards, Alex Crook, Meredith Lewis and Jenny Smith

Jacob Marx Rice’s dramedy of death phobia is good-hearted but hampered by a list-like structure

Explicit two-hander about sexual power in millennial relationships

Tom Littler directs a sparkling revival of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 irascible comedy of manners, starring Jane Asher

Generous-spirited and accessible imagining of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio

Douglas Rintoul’s staging of Emma Rice’s whimsical version of Noël Coward’s romantic classic is lively and playful

Engaging love-triangle drama based on the French classic

Galvanising gig-theatre show charting growing up, music-making, trauma and healing