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).

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?

Of all the ingenues in all the world of golden TV sitcom, Felicity Kendal was the most innocent, the most wicked, the most deceptive, with an amaretto voice that wheedled like a child and seduced like a witch. Half a century on, there must be a heck of a portrait in her attic because at 78 Kendal displays intact all her qualities – including that elfin prettiness – in a glorious star performance as Filumena, the mother-of-three in want of a husband in Eduardo di Filippo's classic comedy.

Air travel is bad for us. Yes, yes, I know we need planes to take us long distances, but look at the downside: not only the carbon footprint, but also the anxiety. I used to feel pretty relaxed about flying, then – one day on a short European flight – there was a spot of turbulence and I glimpsed the faces of the cabin crew. And they were certainly not relaxed.

The writer-director Josh Azouz and actor-director Kathryn Hunter have collaborated on a piece exploring the ethics of being an army of occupation. Or, at least, I think that’s what Gigi and Dar is aiming for. 

Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can seem like hapless histrionics and just a bit daft.