I am writing this in the sun after many days on the trot spent from morning until 11 at night in Jane Eyre’s wonderful new home at the National Theatre. During previews we work every day, refining, changing, have a quick dinner break and then perform a preview performance. It’s the culmination of over two years of living with this story, since Sally Cookson first contacted me in late spring 2013 to discuss her plan to turn this extraordinary book into a piece of theatre.

When I got the call enquiring whether I’d like to adapt The Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year Dear Lupin for the stage, the first thing I did was to thank my lucky stars. Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son is a collection of real letters, written over 40 years, by racing correspondent Roger Mortimer to his wayward son Charlie (christened “Lupin” after Mr Pooter’s disreputable son in Diary of a Nobody). While I’ve been an actor for 40 years, and a writer for 15, I’d never take the plunge of attempting to write a proper play.

Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current Queen Elizabeth, our The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre tells the compelling story of the movers and shakers, the buildings, the playwrights, the plays and the audiences that make British theatre what it is today.

Of all the art forms, theatre has been most attentive to the story of HIV/AIDS. Leading the way in America there was Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991). In the UK the most resonant exploration of the virus’s devastating impact was Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994).

Gruff Rhys has called it the Great Welsh Media Gang-Bang. This year everyone who is anyone (who can get funding) has hopped on a plane for Argentina to follow in the footsteps of the 150 Welsh men, women and children who emigrated to Patagonia 150 years ago – broadcasters, musicians, politicians, journalists, comedians.

If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.

Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as they tried to turn pro. The hero of Almodovar’s Live Flesh was a wheelchair-bound basketball player embodied by Javier Bardem. But what about theatre?

A Level Playing Field is the first play in my trilogy Education Education Education. The trilogy is my response to the black cloud of exams which has arrived in our household every spring for the last nine years – just as the sun was beginning to shine.

It is my response to the maniacal devotion to testing and prescriptive teaching in our schools, in which exams are not just a diagnostic part of learning but the sine qua non of an education based on conformity and compliance.

Andrew Comben, CEO of the Brighton Festival, chooses ten locations that have resonance with the annual event. He talks about their past and future but, most particularly, what will be happening this May

“Brighton Festival is all about the spaces and people of the city,” he explains, “Some of these spaces are especially evocative. They make artists think about doing things in different ways and make audiences respond accordingly. We have to strategise, sometimes taking over places that are used for other things most of the time. It’s always an adventure.”

One night in Cape Town, I was caught in a power cut. Like an untenanted theatre, the city went utterly dark, darker than perhaps it had been since settlers first arrived three centuries earlier. Street lamps, restaurants, car showrooms, offices were all plunged into Stygian gloom. Without traffic lights to impose order, we drove tentatively over the shoulder of Table Mountain and suddenly, sprawled out on the Cape Flats and shining as brightly as the stars overhead, were Guguletu and Khayelitsha. The lights were on in the townships.