Ava Pickett’s award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives of three young women living in Henry VIII’s England in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It’s less Wolf Hall than a wolf howl of outrage against the double standards, toxic rumours and patriarchal injustices that plagued the lives of spirited women whether they were living in a palace or the remote countryside.

Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by exaggerating its latent irrationalities seems redundant. For this reason, perhaps, revivals of plays by Eugène Ionesco have been rather infrequent in recent years.

“Who’d be a woman?... Who in their right mind would choose all that?” The question comes towards the end of a conversation where two former lovers are comparing notes on their tumultuous recent past.

One of them, Jo, has just had a baby. The other, Harry, has taken hormones to transition from being a man to being a woman. In answer to the question, Harry replies, “No-one does though, do they? No-one chooses… Some of us just come the long way round.”

Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s superb adaptation is that it projects this idea through, fittingly, one of the most truly collective performances London has seen in years. 

Why should we not look back in anger? With the Oasis reunion tour in the news recently, the title of John Osborne’s seminal kitchen-sink drama – which kicked off the whole cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Men on its first staging in 1956 – has again become familiar in its reminted version, to a new generation.

The title sounds as if we ought to be in for an evening of Virginia Woolf, and, indeed, one of the astonishing women on view (Deborah Findlay) was in fact a co-star of the recent West End version of Orlando. In fact, this late-summer offering is a scorching reminder of the power of European theatre at a venue, the Almeida, that has of late focused its attentions (often very well) on the American repertoire, from Tennessee Williams to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, amongst others.

I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance might, just might, lead me to reflect on the wisdom of revisiting the adolescent past.

Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani’s masterful performance as Lear sears the stage.

There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its plot is driven by the same Lara/Yuri dynamic, of an overwhelming love affair trying to outflank the forces of history. Now it's been adapted at the Almeida as a play-with-music by Conor McPherson, with lush songs by Elvis Costello, directed by Rupert Goold. It’s not remotely Christmassy, though offers a gift of no ordinary kind.

This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in playful games with the idea of theatricality.