Mario Vargas Llosa has written a thriller which opens eye-poppingly. Two wives, one staying over with the other, discover in the course of the night that they are in fact bisexual.

Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play.

Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that talked explicitly about sex and sexuality.

Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.

Henri-Georges Clouzot is one of the giants of French cinema history, such a versatile master of entertainment that his qualities as an auteur and art-house director are sometimes forgotten.

That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production.

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.

This album has been about in virtual form since last autumn but now receives physical release. In more ways than one. Since theartsdesk didn’t review it back then, its reappearance on CD and vinyl gives us an excuse to now. After all, Swedish musician Karin Dreijer – once of The Knife – is fascinating, an artist who pushes at the boundaries. She revived her Fever Ray persona last year amidst videos revelling in sci-fi weirdness and orgiastic BDSM imagery. Plunge is the musical life statement that follows.

Five years ago Dreijer divorced, shaking off the “Andersson” that once double-barrelled her name. She has since been exploring her mostly gay sexuality in an untrammelled physical manner, according to both interviews she’s given and the lyrics here. Where Fever Ray’s eponymous debut album, nine years ago, was morose, the sound of a woman trapped, depressed even, by parenthood, Plunge is an explosive liberation. With it comes a twisted electro-pop that upon occasion, as on the celebratory “To the Moon and Back”, is even light and accessibly melodic.

That’s not to say this is all easy stuff. On “Falling” she seems to be exploring her sexual identity via a chugging Gary Numan-esque machine rhythm, while the techno pulsing “IDK About You”, with its occasional orgasmic yelp samples, may be about Tinder hook-ups and trust. The true centrepiece and manifesto, though, is “This Country”, which stridently identifies sexual repression with political will. Many will turn to the line “The perverts define my fuck history” but, perhaps, it’s true core lies in the couplet “Free abortions and clean water/Destroy nuclear, destroy boring”.

Plunge is less art-obtuse than much Dreijer has been involved in, closer in tone to Björk and, musically, Santigold’s underheard 2016 album 99¢. She remains her own creature, not releasing this through commercial imperative but as a necessary proclamation, yet it’s as pop as anything she’s done since The Knife’s second album 12 years ago.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "To the Moon and Back" by Fever Ray

“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.

The revival that almost didn't make it into town has got the Royal Court's 2018 mainstage offerings off to a rousing start. For a while, it looked as if this fresh appraisal of a benchmark 1982 Court title would close on the road, a casualty of the "metoo" campaign and charges of inappropriate behaviour that were brought against its original director, Max Stafford-Clark (himself a former Court artistic director).