Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a breathless first hour in a trilogy of programmes about the world’s oldest trading routes. They were opened up by the explorer and trader Zhang Qian of the Western Han dynasty, about 2,300 years ago.

Hearing that both Javier de Frutos and rabbit heads appear in the new BalletBoyz bill might give you pause. A choreographer so unafraid of graphic content that he started his career with naked one-man shows, and later made a piece about the Pope so sexually explicit and offensive that he got death threats – do the rabbit heads mean we're in for some kind of furvert orgy?

Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) has a problem: she suspects that a British woman who converted to Islam and tops the international terrorism hit list is holed up in a house in a suburb of Nairob controlled by Al-Shabaab. Can her local agent (Barkhad Abdi) fly his tiny spy drone inside the house and confirm the terrorist’s identity? And are the local military ready to capture the terrorist if she leaves?

Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her most important play, although it remained unfinished at her death in 1965, aged only 34; it was assembled from drafts by her ex-husband and executor Robert Nemiroff, finally reaching Broadway in 1970.   

Za’atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world – in a world that rendered travel to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Central African Republic out of the question. And it paved the way for our most ad hoc and unconventional performance yet.

Questions of what is authentic and what is retro get more complicated the more the information economy matures. Music from decades past that only tens or hundreds of people heard at the time it was made becomes readily available, gets sampled by new musicians, and passes into the current vernacular. Modern musicians play archaic styles day in day out until it becomes so worn into their musculature that it reflects their natural way of being. Tiny snippets of time that were once meaningless become memes that are shared and snared into the post-post-modern digital tangle.

I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.

The first face seen in The Gunman belongs to Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan. In a seemingly real broadcast, he says “the Democratic Republic of Congo is the scene of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The conflict is fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth, with all sides suspected of deliberately prolonging the violence to plunder natural resources.” Genuine footage of conflict, starving people and the mines in question accompany this commentary.

There was a magic moment in West Africa when, shortly after independence, in countries like Mali, Guinea and Senegal, the new leaders financed and encouraged new dance bands – telling them to dig deep into their own traditions and no longer feel obliged to imitate the music of their recently departed colonial masters.