Last year’s first season of Deep State featured cloak and dagger exploitations of chaos in the Middle East by the capitalist West and its intelligence services. Judging by its opening episode, this second iteration is about to do something similar, except moving the target area left and down a bit to Niger and Mali.

In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still.

The apocalypse arrives as a series of collegiate sketches in the aptly-named Pity, the Rory Mullarkey play that may well prompt sympathy for audiences who unwittingly find themselves in attendance.

The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it.

Writer Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall imagines modern America in the not-too-distant future. The date is 22nd November 2019 and following an attack on Times Square in which 17 people were killed, martial law has been imposed. Demands for illegal immigrants to be thrown out of the country have resulted in mass round ups and swollen detention centres. Hysteria stalks the country.

Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him, death is nothing compared to the heavy conscience he would carry by doing nothing.

In the previous couple of episodes, some light began to seep into the subterranean gloom of the Copenhagen kidnappers, or at any rate onto their identities and motivations. The military theme with which Below the Surface opened, with Philip Norgaard (Johannes Lassen) being battered to a pulp by his captors somewhere in the Middle East, was proving to be the key to the mystery, as Norgaard himself suspected from early on.

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Theatre increasingly uses digital delights to enhance audience enjoyment. And you can easily see why. Visual effects that mimic the experience of plunging into virtual reality inject a much-needed wow factor into otherwise quite mundane stories. And if there are plenty of British companies who use such effects, currently it’s American playwrights, such as Jennifer Haley, who are leading the way in the art of the eye-popping visual.

The big surprise of this new-season opener of Homeland was that black ops specialist Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) didn't die at the end of series 5 after all, despite the fact that we last saw him apparently moribund in his hospital bed, having penned a poignant adieu to sometime paramour Carrie Mathison. But, after surviving a hefty dose of sarin gas, he isn't the man she used to know.