I'm not claiming some major prescience or insight here. I am as guilty as anyone of dipping into the music of the sink estates for a small dose of frisson then returning to art and music that confirm my own worldview. But maybe, just maybe, if we had all paid more attention to what was being said by young British men and women from those estates over the last decade, the events of the past few days might not have come as such a horrific surprise.

Tim Minchin, the Australian minstrel comedian, is known by his catweazel hair, thickly kohled eyes and dazzlingly witty songs bashed out at a grand piano about, among other things, the debatable existence of the Almighty. Lately his repertoire of tricks has been expanding. He has toured his show with a full orchestra, he wrote the songs for the RSC's rapturously received stage adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda (which comes to the West End this autumn) and on Saturday he is hosting the first ever Comedy Prom.

I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour.

You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan.

As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of social unity here.

Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East.

Whatever the quality of the material with which they're grappling, there are two undeniable truths about the Belarusian actors who've put their already curtailed freedom on the line by coming to the Almeida Festival this week: they're skilled practitioners of their art and courageous human beings. Read their biographies in the programme and you'll see that the words "detained", "arrested", "attacked", "dismissed" crop up rather a lot. In Europe's last dictatorship, stepping out on stage and speaking a line, a word even, can lead to imprisonment.

Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth.

Situation comedy relies on strong brands, and some ideas just run and run. Yes, Prime Minister is the stage version of the long-running 1980s BBC television shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which memorably starred Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington. First seen at Chichester last year, the play now returns, with a new cast, for a second West End season. But how does this trusty old brand stand up to the stresses and strains of current political life?

Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core?