Theatre is a strange dish. A recipe can be stacked with delicious ingredients, cooked to exacting standards, taste-test beautifully at the halfway mark, yet leave you not quite full, not exactly satisfied, disappointed that it didn’t come out quite as expected when plated up. 

There is star casting, and there is casting the right star – not the same thing. The Donmar’s new production, The Fear of 13, succeeds in the latter category, in spades. 

John Webster’s sour, bloody tale of brotherly greed and vice has been updated by the playwright Zinnie Harris, who also directs her own text at the Trafalgar. The title has a handy [of Malfi] added. But do we really know where we are? Or which century we’re watching?

An incendiary play has opened at the Marylebone, the adventurous venue just off Baker Street. Bigger houses were apparently unwilling to stage it, fearing anti-Israeli protests. Their loss.

Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

How many times does a politician survive wave after wave of attack from rivals, surf the waves of fickle voters and tiptoe around every policy mishap, only to be undone by an appalling error of judgement in their private life, a skeleton in the closet, their own, flawed personality? And how many times, on the downfall of a British PM, does the television news take us back to the moment the disgraced politician stood on the steps of No 10 in their moment of victory?

There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also a cultural goldmine. So powerful is its depiction of the postwar African-American experience that it has inspired at least two other recent dramatic responses: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place (2013).

I turn 36 this year, while living in London and rehearsing my new play The Fear of 13 at the Donmar Warehouse. The cast places a cake on my desk, covered in script pages and 10 pairs of handcuffs. I video the cake, the handcuffs, the singing actors – led by Adrien Brody – who have now broken into a sort of birthday rap. I text the video 5,500 miles to LA to my friend Nick Yarris, the man about whom I wrote the play, whom Adrien Brody is playing.

Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?