Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing.

Feuds make good theatre. I mean, look at the furious 1970s spat between playwright Lillian Hellman and critic Mary McCarthy. Yikes.

Call him Ishmael, and the Zimbabwe-born, UK-based writer Zodwa Nyoni has done just that. That's the name of the solo character in Nyoni's slight but undeniably affecting 50-minute solo play Nine Lives, which caps a season of monologues at the Bridge Theatre that has functioned as so much cultural balm in these parched times.

The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid.

Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs extended.

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith.

Stillness works like a stealth bomb in Nights in the Garden of Spain, in which Tamsin Greig further confirms her status as one of this country's finest actresses.

"Getting dark," or so comments Irene Ruddock (a pitch-perfect Imelda Staunton) in passing midway through A Lady of Letters, and, boy, ain't that the truth? Both this monologue, and the one that precedes it (Playing Sandwiches, featuring the mighty Lucian Msamati), find Alan Bennett in fearlessly penetrating, ever-darkening mode.

The first words of Sunnymead Court, a new play at the Tristan Bates Theatre, are ominous. “We are transitioning from human experiences to digital experiences.” Oof. Thankfully, this isn’t another gloomy lockdown drama about the evils of Zoom quizzes – it’s the story of an unlikely romance between two women who live metres from each other, but have never spoken. 

When the history of British theatre’s response to COVID-19 comes to be written, the names of two men will feature prominently: Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr.