It’s closing time somewhere in the East End. Nah, not the pub, but at a small local shop. Inside, Denise is banging around with some big pans, while Carly is packing up the flowers. Their business is coming to an end and they are about to hand over the keys to the next tenant.

From the moment that the blood-stained Nathuram Godse rises out of the floor of the National Theatre's Olivier stage and demands ‘What are you staring at?

One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem with all the thrills and spills of an Indiana Jones outing, with added Olympians. The National’s version turned out not to be The Odyssey as we know it, though.  

The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell, a verbatim play using excerpts from the same source, but larded by Gillian Slovo into a wider account of the fire by those who were in it, to equally wrenching effect.

"Is everything loss?" the great Oliver Ford Davies once asked on the National's Olivier stage, in the closing moment of David Hare's masterful Racing Demon. That question informs another masterful play, James Graham's Dear England, newly opened in the same space.

Whining Donald Trump and snivelling Boris Johnson claim that they are victims of witch-hunts, although all the evidence suggests otherwise. In 1953, haunted by the iniquitous McCarthy trials that were designed to purge the US of communism, Arthur Miller turned to a real travesty, that of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692.

Plays about the theatre are many and varied, from Gypsy and Noises Off to the numerous Shakespeare works that absorb theatrical performance into their very fabric.

Men are bastards. Okay, not all of us, but enough to make the lives of millions of women a misery. This we know, but anyone who has any doubts might be educated by some of the horrific statistics of sexual assault and domestic violence in the programme of Deborah Bruce’s Dixon and Daughters, a new play at the Dorfman space of the National Theatre.

It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.

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.