Outrage knows no time barrier, as the world at large reminds us on a daily basis. So what better moment for the National Theatre to fashion for the internet age a stage adaptation of Network, the much-laureled 1976 celluloid satire about lunacy and, yes, anger in the televisual age.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In 1976 American anger about the state of the nation was channelled into Network, in which cinema satirised its kid sibling television as vapid and opportunistic. Paddy Chayefsky’s script, directed by Sidney Lumet, starred Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a news anchor who has a nervous breakdown on screen in which he starts preaching and becomes the news. The failing network’s ratings soar, and an ambitious young executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) latches onto his potential to boost the network’s stock value.

Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in this tender, pleasingly unsentimental two-hander.

Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize. He has written opera libretti, a play about revolution for the Royal Court, The Wolf from the Door, and a version of The Oresteia for the Globe.

My friend, the playwright Robert Holman, says that the writing of a play is always “the product of a moment”. Of course, he’s right, but sometimes you have to pick your moment.

Sometimes you go to the theatre and in the first 10 minutes are convinced that the production is going to smash it, only to find by half time that it’s not. Initial delight gives way to mild irritation, and as a member of the ticket-buying public you draw a line under it and hope for better luck next time. A critic, however, must identify what didn’t work and why.

Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history.

Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and understanding of the arts in this country, as I am sure he did for so many others.

Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet.

When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.