It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day.

After all the tides of monologue plays have ebbed, British new writing is now paddling in the pools of state-of-the-nation drama. At the Royal Court, there is Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle, while the National Theatre is staging Moira Buffini’s Manor, a play set in an English country house, the traditional metaphor for examining the condition of the country and its peoples. Both plays, of course, engage with the hot — or should that be gently warming?

One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.

This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.

Hypocrisy. Is this the right word? I don’t mean the play, but the audience. Of course, in the middle of the current COVID 19 crisis, there’s bound to be a certain amount of discomfort when watching Larry Kramer’s 1985 modern activist classic about the AIDS epidemic, since both cost many thousands of lives, but it feels really odd to me to be in the middle of a National Theatre audience where only half are wearing their masks.

For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons. Her new play’s original opening at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was halted due to you know what in March last year, so it was then broadcast as part of the BBC’s Lockdown theatre festival on Radio 3, and it now arrives at the National Theatre, having already won the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award.

Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations.

There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny.

Limbo, in Jack Thorne’s latest play, is a room lined ceiling-high with drawers, a sort of morgue rebooted as a vast filing system. It apparently provides comfy accommodation for the souls waiting to pass over, and its activities are run in tight bureaucratic fashion by Five (Kevin McMonagle), a crisp but likeable Scot with a nice line in candour and a squeezebox on which he plays Gershwin melodies.

Shakespeare's enduring tale of star-crossed lovers is especially pertinent in a pandemic. The fatal plot twist depends on failed communication during an outbreak of pestilence, and one of the most famous lines is Mercutio's heartfelt, "A plague on both your houses" – clearly no idle curse. Written a couple of years after plague had closed theatres in 1593 (when Shakespeare turned to writing poetry) that undercurrent must have been all too real for the first audiences. It resonates still.