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George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a brilliant young graduate, Vivie Warren, boasting about her dazzling achievements as a mathematician at Newnham College, Cambridge. She explains her future plans to a pair of mild-mannered chaps who clearly adore her. Like most of Shaw’s characters, Vivie is hard-nosed, emotionally cold, incapable of speaking concisely and boundlessly self-confident. Quite irritating, in other words. She plans to start a firm with another hyper-brainy female and to make a killing in the London insurance market. This occurs in 1902. Was it normal for two unmarried Edwardian women to enter the world of high finance straight out of university? Hard to say.

The Years is a monologue spoken by a handful of actresses, some young, some old enough to carry bus passes. They stand in black costumes on a white stage explaining to us the significance of memory, history and feelings. Then the story begins. The narrator is a precocious chatterbox born in France during the war who has no aim in life other than sensual gratification. She’s not a human being, just a cluster of nerves, like a taste bud, that registers nice or nasty, sweet or bitter. And that’s it. She has no morality. She doesn’t develop personally because her nature isn’t capable of emotional growth. Yet the audience is expected to admire everything she says about her experiences. Sex is her obsession. As a teen, she brings herself to orgasm on the corner of a table.

Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing champion, born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, who won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1972. Although he lived in London he wasn’t picked for the England team and instead he wore the colours of his native land. He did them proud. Frankie Lucas seems to have spent 42 years sitting in a council flat, smoking weed and sulking The script, by Lisa Lintott, emphasises Lucas’s virtues and downplays his rackety personal life and his habit of smoking bales of cannabis on a regular basis.

Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome. Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech. The Roman soldiers have plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching’ The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s far too noble for his own good and his disdain for power makes him annoying rather than admirable.

The Real Thing at the Old Vic is a puzzling beast. And well worth seeing. Director Max Webster sets the action in a vast sitting room painted electric blue with a white sofa in the centre. A lovely use of empty space. But the preview trailer on the theatre’s website shows the actors seated in a scruffy bomb site where they discuss similarities between Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play and the lyrics of Taylor Swift. Perhaps the Old Vic hopes to attract a younger audience, but this show will appeal most to Stoppard’s lifelong fans. The play marks a major shift in his development. The exuberant and frothy cleverness of his earlier work has acquired emotional weight and a tougher outer shell. There’s a lot of jealousy and anger smouldering beneath the surface.

Some Demon by Laura Waldren is a gem of a play that examines the techniques of manipulation and bullying practised by shrinks on anorexics. The setting is an NHS referral unit where Sam, an 18-year-old philosophy student, arrives with a minor eating disorder. Like every patient, Sam is told that her personality is immersed in a civil war and that two implacable forces – the ‘diseased self’ and the ‘whole self’ – are fighting for control of her destiny. It’s a brilliantly simple trick that any bully can learn in a few minutes. If the patient says something unwelcome, the shrink ascribes the statement to the ‘diseased self’ and adds: ‘I don’t negotiate with the disease.

Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina Miller and Theresa May. It’s well known that Walker detests our current prime minister and he refuses even to allow the Johnson name to sully his script. So although Boris was a key player in the story, he doesn’t appear on stage. Nor does May’s husband, Philip. And her influential advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, are omitted too. Their names are mentioned constantly but we never meet them as characters. Slightly frustrating. May herself comes across as weak, secretive and limited. Plainly she was never suited to high office.