A man and a woman live in a hole in a forest. We don’t know how they got there, though a homespun ceremony they perform suggests some kind of loss. She has difficulty leaving the hole, while he, a creature of the forest, ranges freely, foraging for food, steering clear of the rest of humanity until an emergency forces him to visit a nearby town. We realise, though the couple are British, that we’re in France. A local farmer recognises the man and the story begins to unfold.

Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.

I’ve been working on two projects over the last four years and like buses they’ve arrived on British screens at the same time. On the surface they seem very different. My adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager is a huge epic sprawling espionage drama that spans six episodes and several years, moving from the Egypt of the Arab Spring to London, Spain, Turkey and beyond. My suspense movie The Ones Below, starring Clémence Poésy and David Morrissey, is 90 minutes long and set almost entirely in a house in north-east London.

In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, “Anthelme Mangin”. Other than that he had no memory of who he was, of where he had been, of where he was going, or of what had happened to him prior to arriving on that station platform on that frigid February night.

Za’atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world – in a world that rendered travel to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Central African Republic out of the question. And it paved the way for our most ad hoc and unconventional performance yet.

The back cover of my book makes a big claim. “This book dares”, it says, “to predict the 100 most significant works of art made since the 1990s.” Although the tagline is an entirely accurate description of what I attempt to accomplish in my study of contemporary art, the phrase “dares to predict” has always made me a little anxious. It seems to suggest that the act of forecasting or foreseeing is deliberately provocative, defiant, or even risky.

Art collectors are rarely what one might expect. Everyone has their particular enthusiasms, quirks and foibles, which make their collections unique and reflective of their tastes. In my career as a curator I have learnt never to have preconceptions when visiting collectors. The best pictures can often be found in the most modest of homes. Nothing can beat the buzz of encountering an iconic artwork in the most unlikely of settings. It is a lesson in how important it is not to make judgements about individuals before meeting them properly.

I adapted Around the World in Eighty Days very specifically for my own theatre company, Lookingglass Theatre of Chicago, where I am one of 24 multi-skilled ensemble members who are writers, directors, actors, and/or designers. Although Lookingglass’ work varies, we most often do adaptations of classic stories, frequently epic in scale, told in a highly theatrical, strongly visual and/or physical way.

West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, even The Lion King – all have shown us how Shakespeare’s stories can translate into musical form. It’s not hard to see why: the plots provide strong frameworks for adaptation, with central problems to be resolved, protagonists for us to root for, villains to charm us, lovers to pity – they're all there. Although Measure for Measure is often referred to as Shakespeare’s problem play, its translation into a musical set in Soho in the 1960s feels – perhaps surprisingly – right.

"Helo, ti yw Mark?" A friendly-looking woman on the tiny plane asks me my name. She is a teacher from a Welsh-speaking school in Patagonia, Ysgol yr Hendre, escorting her pupils home from a trip to Cardiff. "I was told to look out for you on the plane. Come and sit with us!" she continues. I am heading to Trelew in the Chubut Province of Argentina to research ideas and gather texts for my BBC National Chorus of Wales commission, part of the 150th anniversary events marking Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia.