The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war.

Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).

As with life, so it is in art: in the same way that one can't predict the curve balls that get thrown our way, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins defies categorisation. On the basis of barely a handful of plays, two of which happen now to be running concurrently in London, this 32-year-old Pulitzer prize finalist seems to embark upon a fresh path with each new venture.

Hampstead Theatre Downstairs' habit of sending shows southward to Trafalgar Studios continues with Richard Bean's Kiss Me. A character study set in post-World War One London, it's a two-hander concerning the attempts of a war widow to conceive a child via an arranged liaison with a younger man.

Matt Hartley's personal take on London's housing crisis returns to the Hampstead Theatre's studio space downstairs and is sure to hit audiences where, so to speak, they live. First seen at the same address in a production not open to the press, the play examines the spiralling costs associated with property in the capital and how those pressures affect the current generation of 20- and 30-somethings trying to make this town their home.

"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen. 

The monster has come alive and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Thirteen actors playing three generations of a very explosive family arrive in full period costume. Towering Dexion shelving units, heaving with foam and cushions and fabrics and off-cuts, reach to the rafters and snake around the entirety of the stage. They form the looming, metallic skeleton of a hugely intricate replica of a three-storey rubber emporium in 1968. The lights, the music, the mingling polyphony of street life, traffic and heavy machinery, flood the theatre. The Kraken has awoken and there’s no way back.

Odd bedfellows are an ideal subject for comedy, and for passion — because opposites attract, right? Well this is certainly the set up of the latest and smartish new drama from American playwright and House of Cards script-writer Laura Eason, which tells the story of an odd-couple meeting that results in some hot sex and some even more heated ambition.

This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.

So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.