IT SEEMS strange to realise that live theatre, with its shared audience experience, is so long ago. But two plays early in the year uncannily chimed with the present.

In February, Juliet Gilkes’s new play The Whip at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford seemed to presage the Black Lives Matter movement.

Uncovering the inevitable political shenanigans behind the 18th-century abolition of the slave trade — fought as passionately as the Brexit conflict — it followed the parliamentary battles over compensation demanded by the slave owners for freeing the 80,000 slaves in Britain’s West Indian colonies. It incurred a debt to the nation only cleared five years ago.

Cornelius Hyde Villiers, a Tory displaying all the blustering finesse of our present PM, fights for every sovereign he can squeeze out of the Exchequer while his Whig opposite, Alexander Boyd’s Chief Whip, is determined to “get abolition done” at any cost.

In the world outside Parliament, Debbie Corley’s Mercy Price, a runaway slave now a powerful campaigner and Horatia Poskitt, an ex-mill worker, mirror the stark realities of exploitation abroad and at home.

The first half of another new play, Faustus That Damned Woman at Hammersmith’s Lyric Theatre , is set in 17th-century plague-ridden London, and it also forecasts the imminent event of the pandemic.

Although overpacked with interesting ideas, Chris Bush’s play fascinatingly reinvents the Faustus legend for our time. In a magnificent performance, Jodie McNee’s Johanna Faustus holds the stage throughout, selling her soul to the devil as the only way to discover whether her hanged mother was truly a witch.

Determined to turn the tables and devote her powers to do good, she travels through history orchestrating scientific progress.

As we desperately look to science to save the world from our present crises, it is to be hoped that Faustus’s efforts to achieve a not-too-distant and doomed silicon Utopia do not come to pass in reality.

Theatre online can never match up to stage performance but one recent production, Carl McCasland’s Little Wars, transferred well from stage to screen.

Set in the Paris apartment of modernist guru Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice Toklas, four famous literary women gather as France faces the 1940 invasion.

While the rivalry between Stein and playwright Lillian Hellman plays out before an alcohol-fuelled Dorothy Parker and a very English Agatha Christie, they are joined by Muriel Gardiner seeking help in her mission to save German Jews.

The crossfire of personalities suddenly takes a dramatic turn when Stein’s young protegee, Bernadette, reveals how she has been savagely gang-raped by Nazis.

Hannah Chissick’s direction and superb performances from a star-studded cast made one forget that we are looking at and listening to talking heads.

In preparation for seeing Little Wars, I read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s own account covering the years of her famous salon, the meeting place of a galaxy of famous modern artists and literary figures including Picasso and Hemingway.

A short book, first published the notorious year of 1933, it’s still well worth including in my books of the year.

But the book that has resonated most contains an increasingly frightening message. How Everything Can Collapse, written well before the Covid-19 outbreak by French scientists Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens, warns of the interrelated convergence of multiple crises endangering both the natural and the man-made world.

Our response, to put our faith in scientific and technological prowess, may at this moment appear to be valid but, according to a late-1960s report from MIT scientists, the very real prospects of “a widespread collapse of our thermoindustrial civilisation” taking place during the first half of the 21st century seems more than possible.

Perhaps not the book to be reading at Christmas but, as our biosphere burns and if our economy continues to kowtow to profit, we either fiddle the same old tune or read this book and act.

The Midlife Mind by Ben Hutchinson, an engaging study subtitled Literature and the Art of Ageing, makes the confident observation that middle age happens around the age of 40.

The book traces a path through those iconic and, dare I say it, not for many overfamiliar great works, from Dante, through Montaigne, via Shakespeare and Goethe and the moderns, and examines what we can learn today of how to manage that period of life when man — Hutchinson deals with women differently — reaches “maturity.” And he defuses any note of overearnestness with humour and revealing self-analysis.

A book first written in 1977 but now republished is more than an interesting but largely forgotten slice of history.

The Romance of American Communism by feminist writer Vivian Gornick is a work of new journalism, with the author spending a year interviewing and recording the memories and experiences of Communist Party activists during the years leading up to and through the 1920s and 1930s Depression.

Gornick admits that there’s a romantic colouring to her style but nevertheless views the many different types of men and women who found a meaning to life via the CPUSA with sympathy, empathy and admiration.

It was a refreshing read in an election year when Joe Biden could be damned by Trumpites as a communist to realise that the US once had many who did not share the populist hysteria that fills their streets and our TV screens.