On New Year's Day, he continued this tradition with a passionate post reflecting on the "terrible year" narrative of 2016, the loss of our social structures, and his hope for more collective action.
With a plot fueled by the certitude that something terrible will happen, this narrative may mean to recall the devastating forward motion of Russell Banks's "Continental Drift".
Looking back, I realise it was the terrible linearity of this narrative that drove me to start writing plays, and which gave my first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking, much of its momentum.
I love terrible inevitability in my narrative.
From this democratic line-up – no conductor, no need – came a reading that was both studied and spontaneous, born of a unity of purpose, an urgent narrative, and the terrible momentum of an unjust act that spirals to its terrible conclusion.
Meanwhile, a convincing Reg E Carthy (who played the political snake Norman Wilson in The Wire) muscularly delivers, in a fire-and-brimstone tone, Che Walker's deranged narrative about a terrible sinner who commits a senseless murder.
Quickly, though, plot and tone began to go somewhere else entirely, with what seemed to be a comic subplot – an employee taking revenge on his budget-cutting boss by kidnapping his daughter – developing into a narrative in which terrible violence, for both victims and investigators, was a constant probability.
End-times narratives offer the terrible resolution of ultimate destruction.
In these spare television adaptations (the books' internal monologues can be seen in the anguish of Wallander's eyes and the exhaustive police procedures are compressed into meaningful glances and crisp cellphone exchanges), he seems especially troubled by a modern generation of disaffected youth, who often come to a terrible end in his dark narratives.
