Terry Grimley picks some spring theatre highlights

It may seem difficult to believe, waking up on these dark mornings, but if you check a calendar you will see that it's official: spring really is just around the corner.

What's more, it's a spring perhaps even fuller than usual of theatrical promise. So here are my tips for ten shows that ought to be hot tickets.

It doesn't include the hottest of all, however – Sir Ian McKellen in King Lear (Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, March 24-June 21), which brings down the curtain on the RSC's year-long Complete Works festival – as that's already officially sold out.

However, I'm told there may be some availability, so it's at least worth asking.

1. Birmingham Royal Ballet: Cyrano/Stravinsky Season (Birmingham Hippodrome February 7-17. Box office: 0870 730 1234)
BRB launches its year with the world premiere of director David Bintley's latest full-length ballet, the latest in a long line of adaptations of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac. Actually one of the previous adaptations, about 15 years ago, was also by Bintley, but with the exception of the costumes (little worn, as that version was not regarded as a great success), this one has started from scratch with new music, choreography and sets.

Carl Davis, whose score for Alice in Wonderland has recently been filling the Rep, will be in the pit to conduct his specially-commissioned music and will go on to conduct more than 70 performances in Birmingham and on tour during the year. The design is by Hayden Griffin and a pyrotechnic design company has been brought in to mastermind a spectacular battle scene. Former BRB favourite Joe Cipolla returns for a guest appearance as De Guiche.

The second week of this spring season season sees the continuation of BRB's ambitious project to stage all the Stravinsky ballets, which so far has lacked nothing except packed houses.

This instalment is a triple bill of mid-20th century ballets choreographed by George Balanchine – Agon, Symphony in Three Movements and Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

2. Richard III - An Arab Tragedy (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, February 8-17. Box office: 0870 609 1110).
A ruthless tyrant seizes control of a country and rules it by terror. Fifteenth century England or 20th century Middle East? To provide a parallel view to Michael Boyd's production of Richard III now running in The Courtyard, the RSC has commissioned Kuwaiti writer and director Sulayman Al-Bassam to produce a version from a contemporary Islamic point of view.

Set in the desert palaces of an unnamed oil-rich kingdom in the Arabian Gulf, his version is performed by a company of actors from Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Al-Bassam comments: "There are three major areas of taboo in theatre in the Arab world: God, sex and politics. As you might expect, these are the very subjects that dramatists and theatre-makers want to get at." Performed in Arabic with English surtitles.

3. If I Were You (Malvern Festival Theatre, February 12-17. Box office: 01684 892277).
Written just before Alan Ayckbourn suffered a stroke early in 2006 and directed by him at Scarborough after he recovered, the master's 70th play poses the question of how a stale middle-aged marriage might be turned upside-down if its partners found themselves mysteriously transposed into each others' bodies.

There has been a sense that Ayckbourn's career has been quietly winding down in recent years, but reviewers seemed to detect a return to form here. This is his original production with John Bramwell and Liza Goddard cast as the protagonists.

4. Coriolanus (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, February 26-March 31. Box office: 0870 609 1110).
Having brought her Hamlet from Cape Town at the beginning of the Complete Works festival, RSC associate artist Janet Suzman appears in one of the year's final productions, playing Volumnia alongside William Houston in the title role.
This is the play with which the former Shakespeare Memorial Theatre finally bows out, in the form familiar for more than 70 years, before closure for its radical rebuild.

5. The Seafarer (Warwick Arts Centre, February 27-March 3. Box office: 024 7652 4524).
Irish playwright Conor McPherson, best known for The Weir, has delivered another dark, funny and compelling play about lonely middle-aged men clinging together over a drink, this time on Christmas Eve in a shabby house in the Dublin suburbs.

As a poker game proceeds a stranger arrives, bringing a sinister and possibly supernatural element to proceedings. The latest hit from the National Theatre, this garnered enthusiastic reviews when it was premiered in the Cottesloe Theatre back in September.

6. The Merchant of Venice (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, March 22-31. Box office: 0870 609 1110).
F Murray Abraham, best known as Salieri in the film version of Amadeus, plays Shylock in this production from New York-based company Theatre for a New Audience, which became the first American company to bring Shakespeare to Stratford with Cymbeline in 2001.

7. Uncle Vanya (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, March 23-April 14. Box office: 0121 236 4455).
Rachel Kavanaugh makes her directing debut as the Rep's new artistic director with a new adaptation by Bryony Lavery of Chekhov's masterpiece. With design by Ruari Murchison, this reunites the team which delivered an impressive account of Ibsen's A Doll's House in 2004 (Birmingham Repertory Theatre March 23-April 14).

8. Kean (Malvern Festival Theatre, April 16-21).
A real collector's item. Antony Sher plays the title role of early 19th century Shakespearean actor and proto-celebrity Edmund Kean in Jean-Paul Sartre's little known play from 1951, in which French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo once played the lead.

Adrian Noble directs this production from veteran producer Thelma Holt, which is one of the most eagerly-awaited productions destined for the West End this spring following a short tour.

9. Nothing But the Truth (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, May 23-26 Box office 0121 236 4455)
10. Sizwe Bansi is Dead Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (May 29-June 2. Box office: 024 7652 4524).
An unmissable, if fortuitous, double-bill. The South African actor, director and playwright John Kani was last seen in the West Midlands last spring playing Claudius in Janet Suzman's production of Hamlet from the Baxter Theatre Centre, Cape Town, as part of the RSC's Complete Works season.

A legendary figure for the apartheid-era classics Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island which he co-wrote and presented with fellow actor Winston Ntshona and director and playwright Athol Fugard, he now stars in his first play as sole author.

First staged in 2002, Nothing But the Truth looks at post-apartheid South Africa and the tensions between those who took part in the struggle at home and those who returned in triumph from exile.

The Arts Centre is now a regular touring venue for Peter Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, and if the last couple of offerings from the veteran director may frankly have been disappointing, his name is still a three-line whip for theatre buffs.

The most famous example of the theatre of protest created at Johannesburg's Market Theatre by John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard in the 1970s, Sizwe Bansi has survived as a timeless classic with its Godot-like story of two powerless individuals scratching out a life under an oppressive regime. Performed in French with English surtitles.