The war in Afghanistan has not exactly been neglected by contemporary British theatre, and the plight of returned soldiers is a standard trope of new writing. These distant wars function in our culture like worse-case scenarios, an excoriating version of hell on earth, where survivors come back to haunt the comfortable, and to tell us things about being human that we never really wanted to know. Some playwrights have found poetry among the ashes of hatreds and horrors – and writer Owen Sheers is one of their number.

Feral kids are a media stereotype, but they make good strong subjects for drama. In Anna Jordan’s new play, which was first seen at the Manchester Royal Exchange last year after winning the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2013, we are introduced to two young brothers who have been abandoned by their parents. Hello Hench, who’s 16 years old; and hello Bobbie, who’s only 13. They have no father and their diabetic and alky mother stays away with a succession of boyfriends, the latest one called Minge-face Alan.

Be careful what you wish for. I’ve often moaned about the fact that British theatre is too naturalistic, and that its stagings are too banal, full of quotidian detail and a specific sense of place, but strangers to the wildness of the imagination. So I have found myself wishing for more exciting settings, and bolder directing. And here at last comes one solution to the miseries of naturalism – a boldly staged revival of master penman Simon Stephens’s 2001 play, Herons, directed by this venue’s artistic director Sean Holmes.

I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.

Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson’s The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even winning inclusion in the National Theatre’s list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. It’s also a deceptively simple, unassuming offering – on the face of it, not much even seems to happen. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics, just a few spooky stories told by locals to an intriguing newcomer in a rural Irish pub.

It is a nightmare scenario: you have an accident that leaves you comatose. You are out of action in hospital for three weeks and then, when you wake up, you gradually realise that you don’t remember anything of the past 10 years. Not three weeks, but 10 years! So what has happened to your life? This is the basic premise of Olivier- and Tony-award-nominee Peter Quilter’s new drama, 4000 Days, whose title aptly describes the gap in the experience of its protagonist, played by the ever-watchable Alistair McGowan.

You have to admire Rob Hayes’s choice of titles. Although his latest doesn’t quite have the shock value of Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked, his 2014 Edinburgh Festival hit, This Will End Badly is certainly full of enough foreboding to wipe any superficially optimistic grin off your face. First seen at Edinburgh last year, this one-man show is characterised by its vivid language, harsh humour and fury of delivery in Ben Whybrow’s exceptionally winning performance.

Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Korea surely occupies a special place in any such hierarchy, possibly because we’ve entered the late phase of totalitarian statehood (which seems doubtful), or because the incarnations of third generation dynastic Communism have become so peculiar that they stand out even by the standards of the genre.

One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.

The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoyant way to inaugurate the new theatrical year is hard to imagine.