Vanished are the theatrical hero-villains. Instead, our stage villains must be taken from real experience; more and more, theatre is becoming a commentary on the threats and terrors that affect daily life. From Edinburgh graduate Ella Hickson's award-winning Eight to the Traverse's 7/7 contemplation Pornography, our villains are the altogether real people who become bombers, or inflict cultural repression – from religious leaders and parental figures to the dictators of modern fashionable life.

The Lyceum's Macbeth, for instance, is a troubled leader rather than a born sociopath. Elsewhere, more and more theatre is based upon verbatim reports of catastrophe. We have lost our kings and princes, replacing them with the saga of the common man, the immigrant, the mother. Symptomatic of this is the focus on the individual and with it the ascendancy of the monologue as the ultimate means of personal expression. Alongside racks of the new genre dubbed "misery-lit"—available in all good bookstores—dramatic writing has always explored harassed lives and the broken dreams of a generation, but perhaps never more so than now.

Cherry Blossom, an exploration of immigration currently playing at the Traverse, uses monologue to communicate its darkest story. At other times, the actors play out verbatim accounts of the tragic event based on phone camera evidence. This technique works very well, and is presumably in place to produce the element of "truth" that, it is assumed, the audience need in order to feel sympathy or even empathy towards the characters. Yet is this the case? It is certainly true that audience members emerged visibly shaken from Fringe success Charlie Victor Romeo, a series of re-enacted verbatim black-box recordings from aeroplane crashes; if they had not been told that these specific events had happened in real life, would the reaction have been more nonchalant?

Theatre like this is pushing the bar on discussing real-life terror and destruction in the theatre without once producing a razor-blade, while simultaneously elevating the ordinary bystander to the level of tragic hero. This idea has been progressing within drama for a while, and perhaps this is its apotheosis. Perhaps, also, playwrights should beware that they do not entirely relinquish the role of creator for that of researcher.