Drama is writing in thin air, its content instantly spirited away into unreliable memory, so if a play is to be revived a quarter century on from its first run, it has to say something substantial about the human condition. Patrick Marber's Closer does so because people are always balancing the need for love with the need for sex, dealing with the gnawing desire for someone just out of reach, wearily coping with the emotional baggage of lives lived badly.

Hunger for the gruesome horrors and euphoric highs of Greek tragedy seems to be stronger than ever. Yet when it comes to epic sequences, nothing in recent decades has quite had the impact of Peter Hall’s Aeschylus Oresteia at the National Theatre or John Barton’s three-night RSC journey from Aulis to Tauris The Greeks. Now Age of Rage from Ivo van Hove and his Internationaal Theater/Toneelgroep Amsterdam joins them in the pantheon of great theatre.

“We all make history, one way or another.” But some of us make more history than others, and a group of 27 English schoolboys who got lost in Southern Germany in 1936 haven’t made much, unfortunately.

Thomas Pynchon’s saturnine '70s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) begins with “[a] screaming [that] comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” In contrast, on 10 March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Ethiopian Airlines took off from Addis Abada and, six minutes later, plunged into a field near the town of Bishoftu and killed 157 people, there very much was something to compare it to.

To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural Argentina, that’s also how you make – and break – men. Brickmakers is the third of her books translated as part of the expertly-curated series of contemporary Latin American literature published by the Edinburgh-based Charco Press.

Memories are notoriously treacherous — this we know. I remember seeing Shelagh Stephenson’s contemporary classic at the Hampstead, when this venue was a prefab, and enjoying Terry Johnson’s racy staging, which starred Jane Booker, Hadyn Gwynne and Matilda Ziegler as the trio of bickering sisters, and then being blown away by his West End version, in which comedy heavyweight Alison Steadman partnered Samantha Bond and Julia Sawalha (with Margot Leicester thrown in for good measure).

Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations.

“The challenges of the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains. If you stand too close, you won’t be able to see their peaks. Once you step away from the currents of life, you will have the full view…” This is the advice a grandmother offers to her beloved granddaughter in Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s lyrical family saga. Born in North Việt Nam, Nguyễn won a scholarship to study in Australia and currently lives in Jakarta.

So much for the assertion that nowhere in the world would be staging the big Strauss and Wagner operas for the indefinite future. With a combination of lavish funding and good pandemic management on Austria's part, it’s been possible in Salzburg.

Theatres will begin gently unlocking their doors as we head into August. In the meantime, a beleaguered community continues to find fresh and startling ways to sustain interest and excitement, whether that be the premiere of a new play starring Andrew Scott at the Old Vic or a pictorial tour round long-shuttered playhouses from the photographer Helen Murray.