The Holland Festival is one of the greats. It has a British director, the articulate Ruth Mackenzie, formerly of the Chichester Festival and the cultural Olympiad, now into her second year. It’s the same age as Edinburgh and Avignon – 70 in 2017 – but not as well known, though it should be. “We must,” Mackenzie says, “seriously punch above our weight. And we do.” The festival was founded after the Second World War on, comparable to the Scottish and French ones, principles of reconciliation and presenting the best productions of the human spirt.

Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a teenager had been introduced to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew about the vast numbers of war dead, of how they exceeded the populations of famous cities.

Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His grounds were that I had failed to acknowledge the mortal danger facing those errant elopers, Hermia and Lysander. He had, he said, expected better of me.

It’s either serious or it’s funny. That’s a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing television comedy from my biography in the theatre programme.

“Why?” I asked.

“People will think you’re not a serious playwright.”

“A serious playwright can’t write comedy?”

“It’s a bit worse than that.”

“How, exactly?”

“Well, it’s not just that you’re writing comedy, it’s that you’re writing comedy for television.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good.”

I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal procedure. In my research, I read many articles and accounts of young women who were living with the emotional and physical consequences of FGM. I’d watched disturbing and devastating footage of young girls being cut, so it was difficult to comprehend how anyone could allow this act to happen, let alone celebrate it.

A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflection on this tour were, out of necessity, brief; our schedule, out of necessity, hectic. Contrasts were commonplace. Vatican City was our 191st country, and our two-year tour to play Hamlet to every nation in the world was rolling rapidly to its conclusion.

Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based around the 74 deaths that take place onstage in the work of the most renowned playwright in history. It's a collaborative effort between physical theatre group Spymonkey and theatrical innovator Tim Crouch, both acclaimed Brighton talents.

Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black farce, in which the little man as hero suffers an endless series of blows, reverses and pratfalls. Some are minor, some cataclysmic, but they all have one thing in common: they fail to deter their victim who, like one of those clown figures mounted on a toy rubber ball, always rolls back into the upright position.

I notice a teenage boy hanging around the bus stops near where I live in south-east London. I’m reminded of myself when I was 17, after I’d left school with hardly any qualifications, looking for something to do, suddenly lost without the day-to-day structure of lessons, breaks and home-time.  

Marc Rees (b 1966) is an interdisciplinary artist-performer from Wales whose works are renowned for imaginitively mixing media, as well as for their underlying sense of fun. Over the years he has been based in Berlin, Amsterdam and Canada, and now runs the collaborative arts company RIPE (Rees International Project Enterprizes).