Whorehouses, gay prostitution and suicide – you can see why James Jones’ bestselling 1951 novel was bowdlerised by the publishers and sanitised into subtext by Hollywood for the Oscar-laden movie released a couple of years later. As the extensive list of trigger warnings at the box office suggests, we’re very much in the world of the unexpurgated original text (eventually published in 2011) for this West End revival of Stuart Brayson’s and Sir Tim Rice’s musical.

Scottish playwright Rona Munro is both prolific and ambitious. After her trilogy of historical dramas, The James Plays, was staged in 2016, she continues to work on her cycle of seven works, covering the years from 1406 to 1625, which are designed to give today’s Scotland a contemporary equivalent of Shakespeare’s medieval history cycle.

I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the gullible out of their savings and shoe-horning right-wing ideologues into political and judicial office. Thank God (ironically) that we’re too smart for that kind of nonsense in Europe. 

How’s that turning out then? 

It lasts only an interval-free 60 minutes, with an upright piano as its only prop, but Anoushka Lucas’s one-woman show Elephant in the Bush’s Studio space prompts an epic trigger warning. It will discuss “racism, Empire, colonialism, classism, animal cruelty” and there will be "infrequent references to the consumption of drugs”. (Note, no expllcit sex.) 

As its title suggests, Peter Gill’s Something in the Air is an elusive piece – it’s about catching at instinct, responding to intuition, bringing together overlapping hints of present and past lives. From these different stories, spun out of lived experience and imagination equally, the octogenarian playwright leaves the audience to craft a whole.

Opening a theatre should be a celebration, says Nica Burns, the West End power behind this new theatre which is situated next to Tottenham Court Road tube. The co-owner of Nimax Theatre group, she has come up with an elegantly gleaming 600-seat theatre in the round as part of the urban regeneration of the scuzzy top of Charing Cross Road.

The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky was written in 1995. What is notable is its timely scheduling by the National Theatre.

This is not a play for the squeamish: here be blood and cum and unsavoury descriptions of genitalia, male and female, that make you wonder why humans relish sex so much. And it’s all played out in the close quarters of the small in-the-round space of the Orange Tree.

As 10-year-old Satsuki observes as she arrives in the countryside with her little sister Mei, “We’re not in Tokyo anymore” – and they’re not in Kansas either, but there is a tang of Oz in the air.  The 1988 Studio Ghibli film, My Neighbour Totoro has the classic status of The Wizard of Oz for a generation of youngsters brought up on whimsical Japanese animé.

“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled.