In addition to the expected garden-variety trends (like children condemning their parents for destroying their lives), there are more exotic motifs to ponder. Take, for example, the violent and sustained use of a foam bat or rubber truncheon to beat people and/or furniture (an activity that showed up in four separate plays). Two very different works (or is it three?) have cited John Donne’s “Meditation 17,” the one that says “no man is an island,” and three have featured the protracted onstage strangulation of a woman.

I am sorry to report that thus far I have noted only one instance of a mad hunchbacked industrialist who plans to take over the world, but it’s early days yet. In the meantime, perhaps those with the Knowledge can read from these portents the fate of the Euro, the future fashion choices of the Duchess of Cornwall or the winners of the 2012 Olympics.

Anyway, none of these have been what you’d call “get happy” productions, a breed that dominated the West End last season. And I spent Saturday with two plays, set in the early 1960’s, that took place under the shadow of a mushroom-shaped cloud.

In the first of these, a matinee of David Hare’s “South Downs” at the Harold Pinter Theater, a character mused about how science-fiction movies set in the future tend to be all-white, without the satisfactions of rich colors. And lo and behold, that night at the Donmar Warehouse I attended a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s apocalyptic “Physicists” set in a blindingly white insane asylum. (Spend enough time doing nothing but going to plays, and you start to imagine they’re talking to each other.)

Written in 1961, “The Physicists” clearly hails from the era of “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail-Safe,” where H-bomb fears were at their height. It also traffics in the “who’s-running-the-asylum” whimsy that would pervade countercultural films later in the decade.