For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.

Patriarchy is a trap for both men and women. This we know. But it’s not often that its takedown is as amazingly theatrical as this fabulous entertainment, Tender, by American playwright Dave Harris, now getting its wonderfully noisy premiere at the Soho Theatre. It’s a wildly immersive show, partly orgiastic, partly touching the bits other entertainments cannot reach, and brought to us by director Matthew Xia, who previously teamed up with the playwright to create the hit Tambo & Bones.

The aftermath of school massacres for those left behind, and the pros and cons of restorative justice have become two strong themes for drama in recent years. Writer Fran Kranz combines the two, in an intense, claustrophobic piece that attacks both the brain and the heart. 

There has been a trend in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in recent years to portray Athens as a sexually repressive regime in which Queen Hippolyta is resentfully shackled to Theseus after he has conquered her in battle.

The USA was still months short of Pearl Harbour’s shove into World War II when Bertholt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It was many years into a Cold War by the time it was first staged in 1958. It will need a historian of the future to draft the next sentence, the one that heralds its revival at the RSC in 2026.

David Pearson’s debut play, Firewing, part of Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE project for emerging writers, is a heartfelt two-hander about the importance of passing stuff on.

Decades are never neat: they don’t simply go from 1 to 10, or 0 to 9. So it is with the Swinging Sixties, which actually began – like sexual intercourse for poet Philip Larkin – in 1963, the year of the Profumo Scandal, Kim Philby’s defection and the satire boom, all of which signaled the end of deference. Oh, almost forgot, and this is when the Beatles’ first LP, Please Please Me was released, an album whose title has been borrowed by Tom Wright for his play about the band’s manager Brian Epstein. Staged at the Kiln theatre, it is directed by the venue’s boss Amit Sharma.

Wars in the Middle East provoke furious arguments. Red hot. So why is British theatre so cool, distinctly chilly, about staging new work about these controversial issues? If any proof is needed that current new writing is meek and mild then it must surely be this.

This new play, In The Print – by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky – gives a pacy account of the seminal moment when Rupert Murdoch moved News International to Wapping. Over the last decade and a half the playwriting duo have rolled up their sleeves to tackle political subjects including Brexit and the fight to succeed Labour PM Harold Wilson – and here they put the lens on the moment that changed the newspaper industry for ever.

Returning to the West End to celebrate two decades since those strange muppetty posters went up on London buses, I’m still laughing along with “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.