The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah Gordy at the National Theatre, was one of my highlights of 2019.

Seldom can a title have given so much away about the play to follow, not just in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of the sledgehammer approach to driving home its points. Kimber Lee, who won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2019, International Award, certainly does not say anything once if she can say it twice or thrice nor leaves any ambiguity about every element of her stance regarding Orientalism.

CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★

“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into English by Penny Hueston. The sentence, suspended against the page’s whiteness, a clause unto itself, is simple, short, and grammatically reasonable.

That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it.

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.

Just when you’ve relaxed a little, privilege duly checked and confident that you won’t be guilt-tripped for nipping into that disabled loo a few years ago at the National (c’mon, the interval was nearly over and needs must), FlawBored drop a bomb into the narrative. The temperature in the room plummets, a real coup de théâtre is effected and I'm still processing it.

Before I knew – or realised – I wanted to write about alcoholism in my play Blackout Songs (premiered last autumn at the Hampstead Downstairs and moving this weekend to the mainstage), I wanted to write about love and memory. I'd had three very close friends lose their dads to Alzheimer's in the space of about six years – all very young – and I'd seen how the deterioration of the mind and memory was in many ways as devastating as the physical.

There’s a disconnect on the third album by Brighton rockers Black Honey. The music is rousing post-grunge indie rock, tuneful, full of vim, but the lyrics speak of someone deeply troubled. The mood is, perhaps, best summed up by “Rock Bottom” which states, “Rock bottom – but the floor keeps dropping.” The whole album is mired in similar mind-strife.

Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do.