The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio.

A dystopian present. Sirens ring out across the city. Firefighters rush to the wrong locations. A man insists on entry to a big house.

He’s not selling anything, so he can’t be an arsonist can he? His friend turns up and she’s pretty upfront about her intentions – and the barrels of petrol in the attic rather give the game away. But the wealthy homeowner, so ruthless at work, is so polite at home, the coming conflagration all but accepted as a matter of… manners, social convention, apathy?

We’ve all heard of the male gaze, but what about its subversion? Overturning masculine dominance is one of the themes of Boy Parts, the acclaimed debut novel by Eliza Clark, first published in 2020 and now adapted as a monologue for the stage by Gillian Greer.

There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time.

Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the perfect sandwich. With just a little more punch to the plotting it would be another masterwork from this award-winning American playwright whose book for the musical MJ arrives on the West End next spring.

Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens.

How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a picaresque trawl through the life of an Australian woman that’s verging on epic, spanning most of her 80 years. And it’s stirring stuff, alternately enraging, sad and very funny. 

It was interesting, in the same week that the England football team trounced Italy 3-1 in a Euros qualifier, to see Dear England again, the National Theatre smash that has just embarked on a West End run at the Prince Edward Theatre.

In 1994, the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin commissioned Marina Carr to write a play to celebrate its centenary. She walked the wards, met the new mothers, and wrote in a hospital study.

A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?