State of the Arts Live Blog

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Written for Exeunt

An accordion wheezes in and out as an old woman takes her last breaths, the musician reacting to each of the performer’s movements with amazing perceptiveness. The woman’s death is simple and gentle; a quiet celebration of her life. But watching this, I was left oddly cold; astonished at the technical skill of both the actress and the musician, but distanced from the piece and unable to feel any emotional connection with this moment of intimacy.

It’s a feeling I couldn’t entirely shake off throughout Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Translunar Paradise. The piece is a soft look at one man’s memories of his wife and is intricately crocheted together with immense skill, but its physical eloquence belies a thin narrative. The story feels slight, a lightweight metal coat hanger on which to drape a beautiful garment: man meets woman, man marries woman, they live together, she works, he does too, she gets old, he does too, she dies (he doesn’t). Maybe I’m being too pithy. But then that’s really all that happens.

Written and directed by George Mann, the piece was created in part as a response to the death of his father so perhaps this singular focus is understandable. He wanted to tell a story that would reflect his own experiences, and there is a clear correlation to be made. Life is a thing of beautiful whimsy which should be feted, even in death. End of story.

But even for those, like me, whose hearts are clearly hardened, it is impossible not to be awed and impressed with the physical dexterity of the performers and the evident care and skill that has gone into the making of this show. Mann and Deborah Pugh embody their creations utterly, skipping from old age to youthful exuberance in the blink of an eye – or in an intake of accordion breath – as they place masks of aged faces, all drooping skin and neck wattle, over their own. Each change from youth to age feels enormous though it is often achieved through something as simple as a shifting of posture or a tiny movement in the angle of the head. The fluidity with which they dance around one another is glorious to watch. Hours of painstaking effort have clearly gone into the piece resulting in performances of total ease.

The accompanying accordion music is supplied by Kim Heron, one of the most empathic on-stage musicians I have ever seen. She follows the action like a hawk, feeding the story with her music in a way that not only supports each moment but nurtures it. She cradles this couple with her rousing whistles and melancholic arias. She is as much midwife as musician as she brings this tale to life.

In the spotlight: Messianic John (Trystan Gravelle), centre, with Stephen (Danny Webb) and Ruth (Geral­dine James) in the National Theatre production of 13  NATIONAL THEATRE/MARC BRENNER

“I HAVE always thought that the theatre is a kind of surrogate reli­gion,” The Guardian’s longest-standing theatre critic, Michael Billing­ton, says. “It has its disciples and its adherents.” He’s laughing, but we both know that there is some truth in this.

Western theatre is rooted in the miracle and morality plays of the 13th century; so religion and the stage have long been entwined. Billing­ton, per­haps one of theatre’s most devoted disciples, is not alone in seeing paral­lels between the rituals and roles of church and theatre.

For the new incoming artistic dir­ector of the Donmar Warehouse, in Covent Garden, London, Josie Rourke, her love of theatre was fuelled by her Roman Catholic up­bringing. “[It] is born from hours and hours spent in church. . . I read in church as a child, and the act of reading out loud and listening to others read out loud pro­foundly influenced me.” Her journey into storytelling began with perhaps the greatest story of all, that in the Bible.

Interpreting faith: right, left to right: William Tyndale (Stephen Boxer) and Lancelot Andrewes (Oliver Forde Davies) wrestle with the Bible in Written on the Heart

This influence works both ways; some find that their love of theatre develops into an appreciation of the rites of faith. This was certainly the case for my father, who started out training as a theatre director and ended up as the Bishop of Hertford.

In the 1970s, he was not alone in moving from the theatre to religion. There was a palpable shift towards spirituality within many avant-garde practitioners.

The revolutionary Polish theatre-director Jerzy Grotowski believed that the act of communion between an actor and an audience member could take us beneath our superficial reactions to our inner selves. But, after deep research, even those dis­tinc­tions became unnecessary, until, for him, it was just about people’s meeting. “I am not interested in theatre any more, only in what I can do leaving theatre behind,” he said.

One of the greatest names in British theatre, Peter Brook, was profoundly affected by the ideas on movement and proportion devel­oped by the Russian-Armenian spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Brook was eventually to become one of his disciples.

Troubled: Jake Boulter as Thomas, who is torn between loyalties to his mother and father in The Haunted Child ROYAL COURT THEATRE

But, in the wake of two decades of rampant materialism, where is the posi­tion of spirituality on stage today? During the “in-yer-face” move­ment of the 1990s, faith took a back seat for British playwrights, who seemed more concerned with the ten­sions and traumas of urban squalor. Sex and politics played a large part in works that pushed social niceties to their limit, but religion was more or less absent in what appeared to be an aggressively secular art form.

FAST-forward to 2011, and the picture looks distinctly different. In the past year alone, we have seen a number of plays, filling the auditori­ums of some of the biggest theatres in Britain, which have explored reli­gion, belief, and spirituality.

Michael Sheen’s The Passion even took over the town of Port Talbot for a weekend (News, 28 April). This three-day piece of street theatre charted Jesus’s final journey over the Easter weekend, using the actor’s Welsh hometown as the stage. Considering that, only a few years ago, Billington was complaining that, since David Hare’s 1990 play Racing Demon (revived again last year), “Religion rarely surfaces in modern drama,” that is quite a leap.

The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible was a significant contrib­uting factor to this religious revival. Our Christian text has been placed centre-stage, becoming a focal point for believers and atheists alike. At the Bush Theatre, 66 Books (Arts, 21 October) encouraged contemporary responses to each book of the Bible — some more religious than others. The Globe turned the Good Book into a “good read” by vocalising the most famous stories of our time.

Left to right: Patrick (Jude Akuwudike) and Edward (Ian MacDiarmid) struggle with belief in The Faith Machine STEPHEN CUMMISKY

At Stratford-upon-Avon, David Edgar explored the part played by William Tyndale in the translation and distribution of these parables through­out Europe, in Written on the Heart (Feature, 21 October). As the theatre critic Henry Hitchings wrote: “Even in an age when Christian faith is faltering, the language of the 1611 King James Bible is an important strand running through everyday English.”

Hitchings’s point is significant, because many of these projects were not faith-based. Instead, they were explorations of the Bible as a cultural artefact.

As the outgoing artistic director of the Bush Theatre, Rourke oversaw 66 Books, and she is clear that the con­ception of this epic endeavour did not have faith at its centre. Instead, she saw the project as a way of staging a text that was written to be spoken — a text that was “a prism to look at enormous things — some of which are faith and redemption, but some of which are family; it was a great canvas for writers to explore”.

ALONGSIDE this concrete, almost secular, celebration, however, there is something else — another thread within this resurgence of faith, with a less formalised but more spiritual search at its heart. Ben Power is associate director at the National Theatre, and dramaturg on successful shows with other companies, such as Enron and A Disappearing Number.

He feels that there is a wave of new plays “responding to something a bit broader than that anniversary; they are somehow responding to some sort of absence or perceived absence on behalf of those writers, in secular society”.

It is hard not to be aware of the “absence” to which he refers. After 9/11, and in the midst of a financial apocalypse, people may be disap­pointed in the gods that we were told were sacred. Capitalism and consum­erism have proven to be false idols. As our individualistic world crumbles around us, perhaps people are searching for faith in their stories once more, and searching for alter­natives.

TWO writers who shout the loudest from among the rubble are Mike Bartlett and Alexi Kaye Campbell. Bartlett’s epic play 13 is currently running at the National Theatre, while Campbell’s The Faith Machine (Arts, 23 September) caused a ruckus at that historic temple of iconoclasm, the Royal Court.

13 is a charged examination of religious belief in the 21st century, featuring a latter-day messiah, and a government plotting to declare war on Iran — and even mentions an Alpha course. It is a vast piece that throws up more questions than it could ever hope to answer. For Bart­lett, it was both a “state of the nation” story, which reflected the modern landscape, but also a series of ques­tions about “the play between modern morals and traditional morals”.

This dialogue between modern and traditional attitudes to belief also runs strongly through The Faith Machine. Campbell’s story explores the relationship between faith, capitalism, and love, as represented in the increasingly strained relationship between an idealistic girlfriend, her boyfriend, who is in advertising, and her father, a retired bishop, who has disowned his religion.

As with 13, The Faith Machine inter­­rogates our modern need for belief, mixed with our suspicion of those religious institutions that we feel have not provided the answers. Bil­ling­ton wrote in his review: “Camp­­bell’s play . . . is saying some­thing important: that individual­ism is insufficient, that mankind lives by myths and stories, and that we all need some kind of faith, even if we can no longer subscribe to the dogmas of organised religion.”

THIS tension between our search for faith and our refusal to find it in traditional religion is one which the Archbishop of Canterbury has clearly noticed. While he agrees that there has been a resurgence of interest in faith in society, he feels that “it’s not neces­sarily church-related faith, [al­though] people are confronting big questions and asking some quite basic questions around values.”

For Dr Williams, Campbell’s play showed that there is a place for both new and old forms of faith in our lives, as we stumble towards answers. When he read The Faith Machine, he was deeply moved, he said, by “the way in which [Sophie], who had been shaped by a very overt and radical faith grow­ing up, in her father, still recog­nises that she has a radical energy, and acknowledges that she wouldn’t have got that radical energy if there wasn’t someone presenting that more traditional energy, too.”

As an art form that translates the individual experience into a com­munal one, perhaps it is fitting that the theatre should be the home of these expansive questions. There is a sense in which some churches en­cour­age resolution, while theatres thrive on conflict and the tensions that come from the unanswerable. This may be one of their biggest differ­ences. But, in the act of pulling an audience or con­gre­gation to­gether, they are bound in­exorably.

“A play is the nearest thing, I sup­pose, to a service; in a way, we all gather in the same place, we hope for some kind of communal experience,” Billington says. “It’s interesting [this resurgence] is happening in theatre, I’m not aware of it happening on tele­vision, I’m not aware of it hap­pen­ing in the cinema.”

IN A world where many people spend the greater part of their time on individual media devices and online social networks, this ability to provide communal experiences is becoming increasingly important.

Power agrees. “That it is a pub­lic exploration is really crucial, I think . . . Publicly going through that ques­tion­ing, allowing an audience to ex­plore those things in a collective ex­perience does feel really important at the moment.”

As one of the core team at the National Theatre’s Studio, Power is closely involved in the new writing pro­jects that are developed there. Although he does not believe that any­one has an agenda to push — and that the National Theatre certainly doesn’t — he feels that this is a move­ment that will continue.

“At the moment, more and more people are interested in making theatre that asks some fairly funda­mental questions about what it means to have, or not have, these kinds of be­lief structures in your life. And it feels like the momentum is definitely going to increase, and that the number of people being inter­ested in exploring that will increase.”

At the start of 2012, it seems that this spiritual enquiry is going to stay as the big issue in the theatre. Taking us into January, Joe Penhall’s Haunted Child, a psychologically disturbing look at extremist religious belief, is currently keeping faith at the top of the Royal Court’s agenda. But it is not all intimate three-handers; the Batter­sea Arts Centre’s epic col­lab­oration with WildWorks, BABEL, in May, promises to be an outdoor spectacle to rival The Passion. After the coming together of a scattered people as they attempt to create a new Utopian city, and featuring more than 500 per­formers, BABEL prom­ises to be one of the most talked-about theatrical events of 2012.

The RSC returns to theological themes in February. Helen Edmund­son — who adapted Coram Boy for the National, and Swallows and Amazons, currently in the West End — has written a new play, The Heresy of Love. It is based on the extra­ordinary life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a poet, nun, and a Baroque literary figure of Mexico.

“The play imagines a particular time in her life — a time of crisis,” Emundson says. “A crisis which throws up questions about, among other things, the role of women in the Church, and about what happens when we move away from organised religion, and try to create a form of faith which suits the way we want to live.”

Billington hopes that such big questions will continue to bleed on to our stages, and so does Dr Williams: “[I’m] very enthusiastic about faith in the theatre. I think theatre is a kind of liturgical event; it’s one of those few experiences where we have a big important experience together.”

Having himself contributed a play to 66 Books — he wrote a short play about the resurrection in St John’s Gospel — the Archbishop has had first-hand experience of “trying to find a way from the language of public faith and traditional faith into one person’s experience”.

This is a concern that seems to be at the heart of many playwrights today. While they may not have the answers, the search for some form belief is driving these writers to explore personal journeys of faith on public stages. In doing so, they are vocalising the unease of an increas­ingly disenchanted and questioning nation, and placing themselves firmly within theatre and religion’s long legacy.

There’s a striking resemblance in the younger man to the elder standing next to him. As father and son one would expect this, but surprisingly it’s quite a jolt; a visceral reminder of the depth of the relationship between these two performers. It’s a powerful initial impression for Frankland and Sons, a sketchy personal biography about parents, siblings and hidden truths.

When John was left a box of his parent’s correspondence, he asked Tom to help him muddle through these letters of love and practicality. Out of this exploration a show was born. “It’s either marriage or the Bank of England” is a typical quote thrown out in this softly humorous look at relationships and times gone by, ending up in a life changing revelation for John.

The affection for their subjects is palpable in Frankland and Sons and though the secret at its centre is vast, recriminations are admirably absent. Emotion is thick on stage however with John and Tom aiming to pull at the heart strings very deliberately and sometimes even physically (the set consisting of a timeline of red strings with balloon hearts indicating years skating above). Whilst they are deeply likeable a lot is asked of their audience that they haven’t quite won and the regular attempts to draw our own secrets out feel slightly forced.

There’s a determinedly bumbling feel to the music hall style of the piece. It’s a sweet if slightly shabby rendition and on the opening night it felt too fragile to truly fly. But given some breathing space I believe Frankland and Sons will relax into the tender and effecting sharing that it could so easily be.

Runs until 28th January 2012, Camden People’s Theatre

Written for Exeunt

In a festive landscape dominated by pantomime mostly delivered in a very British manner, Slava’s Snowshow is something of a treat. Calling his own style of eccentric pantomime ‘Expressive Idiotism’, Slava Polunin and his band of not so merry men, lead the way into a strange world full of beauty and buffoonery. Children and adults seem equally perplexed as to what precisely is going on, making it not uncommon to hear the question: “What’s that man doing mummy?” answered with, “your guess is as good as mine dear.” But incomprehensibility doesn’t seem to bother the audience overly much; the key here is not to reason why.

Slava’s Snowshow is an incredibly well produced ride, incorporating three points in particular that will blow people away (at one point quite literally). But in an impressively crafted piece the simplest things can also make you feel like a six year old child. Jokes based around hats with wide brims or clowns that inexplicably seem to grow half a foot delight both young and old. Other moments feel oddly moving; a creature flying out of the wings leaving a trail of silver glitter in its wake or angels that shuffle around the stage and look out at you for one sad second. Polunin’s blend of surreal imagery and delicate physical clowning is peculiarly effecting.

This snow-globe world bleeds out into the auditorium with white paper snowflakes practically covering the first three rows in a thick layer. Grannies throw bunches at their squealing grandchildren, whilst even teenagers can’t resist a little flutter. The stage itself is awash with glowing orbs, and cloudy seas; Slava’s Snowshow takes place in a dream world and as such is full of its own, albeit nutty, rules and hierarchies with which this troupe of clowns mischievously play. There’s rhyme and reason here, but not as we know it.

In a show which is mostly mimed, the eclectic soundtrack becomes a powerful tool. Moving from haunting folk melodies to hip swivelling samba, from witty brass ensembles to well known crooners, the rich score gives us a recognisable framework from which we can take tentative steps onto these strange Russian shores.

There are snowstorms, giant cobwebs and huge balls which invade the audience – almost stealing the show; at times it could be accused of creating spectacle for the sake of it. But the production also includes the wealth of a great performer’s knowledge and the chance to see the subtle but astonishing craft that he has worked on over decades. By wedding improvised play and crafted ritual together and lacing palpable fantasies into each spectacle, Polunin shows himself to be a theatrical magician of the first order. Slava’s Snowshow is an awe-inspiring and fun-filled experience, but it is also the crowning work of a performer who has dominated Russian clowning over the end of the last century.

Runs until 8th January

LOTS of fabulous picks here by some people who really know their stuff including some expected and not so expected pieces. Wish I could have mentioned London Road, wish I could have seen Mission Drift…

Originally published on Exeunt

Of course we are wary of the arbitrary nature of these things, the artificiality of seasons, the ordering of experiences into peaks, the hierarchal maps they reproduce, the dangers of placing Fabulous ones next to Those who have just broken a vase.  However at some point you have to be practical.  Our critics have valiantly seen a metric stage-tonne of theatre this year, so what better to relive with sufficient context their most notable moments? And from here it looks like they have produced a list unrivalled for its scope, depth and surprises.  So without further ado-ing, and in no particular order…

Lois Jeary

this is where we got to when you came in
Bush Theatre, London
Although Edinburgh brought the great pleasure of discovering the work of a number of exciting emerging companies – Analogue, FellSwoop and ONEOHONE being just some of my highlights – it was non zero one’s The Time Out at Forest Fringe that really made a lasting impression, and their farewell to the old Bush Theatre was equally mesmerising. It’s not often that a box of old documents proves more compelling than the voices of theatre’s great and good, but in letting bricks and mortar tell the stories of the Bush, through good times and bad, the piece captured the spirit of what makes theatre so special. Like so many people, I’m now grateful to always feel a connection with that unassuming door on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green.

One Man Two Guvnors
National Theatre
I first delighted in One Man Two Guvnors while sat watching the NT Live broadcast on a big screen under a summer’s evening on the South Bank. The expansion of NT Live continues to prove a huge asset to British audiences, and I shall be eternally grateful to this broadcast in particular for sparking discussion between my eighty year old grandmother (who had watched simultaneously from her hometown cinema) and I about how funny that charming James Corden is – not a conversation I ever expected to have, it must be said. Having survived a second viewing, the play is a constant, classic joy which reminds you how good it feels to laugh, how theatre can be at its best by not taking itself too seriously, and frankly, how most things are improved with a song.

Hamlet
Young Vic and by Schaubühne Berlin at the Barbican
Ian Rickson’s Hamlet messed with everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare’s play; then came Ostermeier’s version at the Barbican, and the Young Vic staging seemed positively classical in comparison. Madness was the name of both games and Michael Sheen’s mental fragility was powerfully portrayed, but where the concept occasionally jarred at the Young Vic, the text was all but violated by Ostermeier, trodden upon by a petulant Lars Eidinger and flung headfirst into the mire to see what sticks. Both thrilled in their own mildly sacrilegious ways, and as we embark on a year where the Bard’s work will be paraded in front of the world in all its finery, it’s nice to see it fucked (or played, if we’re being polite) with once in a while.

Tom Philips

Landscape/Monologue
Ustinov Theatre, Bath
You’d be hard-pressed to find some of Pinter’s bleakest hours done better than in this in-house Ustinov production directed by Chris Goode. Clive Mendus, Maggie Henderson and George Irving excelled in registering the huge, roiling personal tragedies lurking behind these seemingly random narrative fragments about feeding ducks in the park, going down the pub or waiting at a railway station. Theatre made out of almost nothing (and all the more beautiful and terrifying as a result), these were small masterpieces of fertile ambiguity and quiet devastation.

Going Dark
Bristol Old Vic Studio
Sound & Fury – they of the doubly immersive Kursk and in-the-dark outings Watery Part of the World and War Music – ventured into the cosmos with a crepuscular tale of a planetarium guide (played with subtle humanity by Jon McKay), whose physical debility echoes our growing knowledge/ignorance of seriously big questions about our place in the universe and the nature of reality. At the start, perhaps, there was a threat that it was going to turn into one of those hideous sitcoms about precocious kids – but then, no, it didn’t go anywhere near such territory at all.

The Guild of Cheesemakers
The Church of St Thomas The Martyr, Bristol
If the storyline turned out to be … well, a bit cheesy, the setting and staging of the Stand and Stare Collective’s contribution to this year’s Mayfest elevated a slice of sci-fi melodrama into something wholly unique. It’s not every day that theatre comes combined with a bona fide cheese, wine and bread tasting led by locally sourced experts, or that a gourmet event in grandiose ecclesiastical surroundings dissolves into an antic tale of betrayal and immortality. Mayfest offered a goodly crop of such boundary-querying pieces this year: Foster and Déchery’s Epic, Guy Dartnell’s Something or Nothing and Little Bulb’s Operation Greenfield were among other highlights.

Natasha Tripney

Mission Drift
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
This gloriously dense and layered piece by the US company TEAM, presented a skewed American myth of origins, a story of the growth of Las Vegas seen through the eyes of a pair of ageless Dutch immigrant teenagers who help raise a city, a ‘desert experiment’, from the sand and watch as it becomes monstrous and unstoppable.  Performed like a concert wrapped in a play wrapped in a concert, the whole production was charged with music, supplied by the honey-tongued Heather Christian; magnificently and sometimes messily inventive, for me it was one of the stand-out productions at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

The Quiet Volume
Bishopsgate Institute Library, London
This delicate piece of audio theatre, co-created by Rotozaza’s Ant Hampton and Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells to be performed in libraries, was memorable as much for the experience itself as for the way its participants were made to be more aware of the act of reading, the imaginative journey that occurs every time you open a book. Experienced in pairs while seated at a table in a working library, the piece had an intriguing intimacy; it made you listen – really listen – to your own ‘reading voice’ and lingered long in the mind.

Matilda
Cambridge Theatre, London
It’s an obvious choice, but this RSC staging of Roald Dahl’s classic tale deserves all its considerable acclaim. Dennis Kelly’s book was faithful but not reverential, Tim Minchin’s songs were funny and charming, the set was truly striking and all the performances were spot on, particularly that of Bertie Carvell as the wonderfully menacing Miss Trunchbull. What was most appealing though was the way it allowed adults of a certain age to re-experience the delicious thrill of entering Dahl’s world at the same time as connecting with children very much on their own level. A genuinely joyful experience.

Daniel B Yates

London Road
National Theatre, London 
With London Road Alecky Blythe crested the recent fashion for verbatim theatre. And it was a triumph, not just for boosting from the curl into an entirely fresh vernacular form of musical theatre with its halting and beautiful recitative, but by exercising a powerful diegetic imagination with a delicate grasp on what Keats once called “negative capability” – rife with unresolved tensions, it fashioned the most revealing and contradictory portrait of suburban community I’ve seen in years.   Much more so than say the clunky mythmaking of the overhyped Jerusalem, here was the country’s guts heaved out onto the stage.  The twitching curtains; the limits of community; the folded Daily Mail; love and anxiety; all the shades of this green and pleasant land.

Every Rendition on a Broken Machine
Forest Fringe, Edinburgh
Edinburgh is not usually a place from which to draw top picks – critical acumen gets hungover, you spend most of your time in the gutter where any glimmer of decent work has you reaching for five stars. For me Ross Sutherland’s hosted documentary Every Rendition at the Forest Fringe came on the heels of some excellent solo-work from Sabrina Mahfouz, Chris Goode, Sandy Grierson and Josie Long.  And yet far from the on-the-fly bustle of the festival this felt like coming across a timeless piece of art. A showcase of ideas without commercial strategy, a revival of a long-term project, with themes that echoed through his previous work. It was mapped with precision, warmth and dazzling attempts on the legacy modernism. Like Adam Curtis crossed with a very nice and funny Ezra Pound, this was live documentary insinuated into performance, showing what is possible when you push at the limits of form and bring with you the sure results of years.

One Man Two Guvnors
Adelphi, London 
It doesn’t hurt to be obvious, particularly when you come across a theatrical event that transcends theatre as a practice for the jaded elites we know, love and in most cases are.  This is a choice less for Richard Bean’s sassy and acute reworking of Goldoni, James Corden’s industrial celebrity and the dedication and skill that came from under its weight as he beamingly bounced and shone on stage, and more for the fact of the experience of the West End this transfer created.  The last audience I recall with a similar make-up was Little Britain live, and yet instead of scurrilous idiot-gruel on stage, here was the broadest cross-section I’d ever seen at a theatre revelling in the well-honed traditions of this country’s stage. NT Live and West End transfers of clever plays (Pitman Painters at The Duchess was also magnificent) are producing a real popular buzz, maintaining the quality of work as they do so.

Tracey Sinclair

Much Ado About Nothing
Wyndham’s, London
Reuniting the Doctor and his Donna, Much Ado About Nothing was bound to be a commercial success and luckily Josie Rourke’s sharp direction (and playful decision to set the show in the 80s, with all the garish fun that allows) combined with David Tennant’s charisma and comic timing and his undeniable chemistry with a better-than-you’d-expect Catherine Tate to make this a sparkling and witty production. Some might have found fault with Tate’s less than expert handling of the language, and her over-reliance on comedy gurning (both justifiable criticisms) but that didn’t really matter – her sparring with an outstanding Tennant (who managed the tricky balance between broad physical humour and irresistible swagger and sexiness, all bundled up in an infectious enthusiasm that would have won over even the Doctor doubters) made them the couple you couldn’t help but root for, and turned this into one of the joys of the summer.

Matilda
Cambridge Theatre, London
Arriving in London already laden with plaudits, Matilda had a lot to live up to: not least in the mind of this child-resistant cynic, who went fully prepared to dislike stage school show-offs being self-consciously cute. Instead, I was blown away by a talented and likeable child cast in a razor-sharp, funny and imaginatively and energetically staged take on this Dahl story that looks set to be a future classic. Bertie Carvel’s villainous Miss Trunchbull is one of the year’s best creations, managing to be both subtle and grotesque and looking like a Quentin Blake illustration come to life, and the whole thing is a delight from start to finish.

The Wild Bride
Hammersmith Lyric
Third place was a trickier choice, as many of my standout shows aren’t new: the return of Mark Rylance in Jerusalem turned out to be every bit as good as the hype, and the 10 year anniversary revival of the Red Shoes by Kneehigh was physical theatre at is best. Perhaps for that reason, the tie between my final two options is finally tipped in favour of Kneehigh’s The Wild Bride, just edging ahead of the utterly charming all-male Iolanthe at Wilton’s. Taking Kneehigh’s fascination with European Fairytales and filtering it through the bluegrass traditions of the American south proved inspired, as did adding a dash of panto to what could have been an unbearably dark tale of a girl sold to the devil who is unwilling to take captivity lying down. Director Emma Rice combined Kneehigh’s usual faultless physical theatre with evocative (and sometimes sly and very funny) music to great effect in this ultimately uplifting tale of love and struggle.

Neil Dowden

Ecstasy
Hampstead
After years away making films, we’ve had a welcome double dose of Mike Leigh in the theatre in 2011. Whilst his new play Grief at the National received respectful rather than rave reviews, the first ever revival of his 1979 play Ecstasy at the start of the year inspired an ecstatic response from critics and audiences alike. Like the original production, directed by Leigh and designed by Alison Chitty at the Hampstead, this slice of life about lonely people meeting in a Kilburn bedsit, featuring sexual assault and binge drinking, sounds the ultimate in misery but somehow Leigh’s compassion and humour turn it into something special. The play may be over-long but the superb ensemble playing meant that you just didn’t want it to end. The show well deserved its transfer to the Duchess Theatre.

Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare’s Globe
There was a battle of Shakespeares as well as a battle of sexes going on in the summer with the Globe’s Much Ado About Nothing going head to head with Josie Rourke’s ‘Doctor Who’ David Tennant/Catherine Tate production in the West End. While the latter’s 1980s staging was fun, most people agreed that classier version was the former, directed with a sure touch by the Royal Court’s Jeremy Herrin, best known for new writing. As a feisty Beatrice, Eve Best confirmed her status as the best stage actress of her generation, with Charles Edwards’s hilarious Benedick delighting the audience with his direct addresses, but it was the chemistry between these sparring partners that caused the sparks to fly. This sultry show tasted as full-blooded as the Sicilian oranges on stage.

Saved
Lyric Hammersmith
After years of shameful neglect, Edward Bond, one of our most significant post-war playwrights, has enjoyed a much-merited revival of interest in the last few years. His 1965 seminal Saved led to the abolition of censorship in the form of the Lord Chamberlain in 1968, as well as influencing in-yer-face playwrights like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. The Lyric Hammersmith production, brilliantly directed by Sean Holmes, was a bit of an event because it was the first time that Bond had allowed his play to be staged since 1984. In this year of rioting and demonstrating, the disturbing depiction of disaffected young people (climaxing in the infamous stoning to death of a baby in a pram) proved this powerful play had not lost its relevance.

Julia Rank

Lines
Rosemary Branch Theatre, London
My favourite new play of the year; young playwright James Fritz’s dazzlingly clever and unexpectedly tear-jerking faux-verbatim play dealt with the repercussions of an imaginary verbatim play charting the death of Ian Tomlinson in which an actor is murdered by the police officer he played on stage. This extreme premise became eerily credible and what could have been quite a theoretical exercise played like a thriller and was performed with outstanding sensitivity by the cast of five (especially David Vale as the victim’s father). The questions that it raised about writerly and dramatic responsibility are still spinning around in my head.

Ragtime
Landor Theatre, London
My companion was very sceptical as to how this epic musical would work on such a small scale, but at the interval he was in tears and proclaimed, “It’s so much better than the West End production!” The whirling melting pot of turn-of-the-century America was superbly evoked in the Landor’s confines and the attention to detail meant that every single member of the cast of 22 left their own individual impression. Robert McWhir’s production could be the fringe musical production against which all others are measured and sets a very high benchmark for the Open Air Theatre’s production next year.

She Loves Me
Chichester Theatre Festival
Theatrical perfection is most elusive, and I was completely and utterly smitten by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s rendering of the much-loved The Shop Around The Corner story about sales clerks in picture-perfect Budapest who bicker by day but write each other love letters via a lonely hearts column by night. Stephen Mear is as accomplished a director as he is a choreographer. Every employee in Maraczek’s Parfumerie felt like an old friend and I immediately recognised Dianne Pilkington’s Amalia as a kindred spirit, whose love-hate relationship with Joe McFadden’s Georg was made all the more delightful by their shared love of literature, and Matthew Goodgame made the most charming cad I’ve ever seen. I still get a glow whenever I think about it.

Stewart Pringle

Matilda
RSC, Stratford
The best start to a theatre-going year I can ever remember having. Matilda feels both impeccable and unpolished, there’s no smack of stage-school or cynical license plundering, despite the talent evident in every aspect it somehow still has grubby little hands and bruises on its knees. Tim Minchin is obviously the star of the show, and it was great to see someone who I’ve found increasingly irritating and smug create something so whole-hearted. The beginning of Act 2 brought tears, and it’s hard to think of anything as eloquent on the spirit of childhood since Dahl passed away 20 years ago.

The Seagull
Arcola, London
Al Weaver’s complex, brittle performance as Konstantin was only the most visible revelation in a production which exceeded all expectations and stands as the best production of The Seagull I’ve ever seen. Geraldine James brought the role of Irina so much to the forefront that her posing and crinoline threatened to blot out the rest of the company, just as it should be and just as it never has been before. The young and the old are equally stupid, equally doomed, and Joseph Blatchley’s production made this as clear as a raindrop.

The Village Bike
Royal Court, London
Of the new plays I’ve seen this year, it was Penelope Skinner’s Village Bike that I enjoyed the most, and also that had the biggest impact. I still don’t know where to place its sexual politics, which at times felt quietly conservative and at others deeply subversive, but in Becky, whose pregnancy sends her sex-drive rocketing, Skinner created an entirely new and fascinating character. The farcical moments were brilliantly awkward, like a sexed-up Vicar of Dibley, while the whole environment seemed to throb with something obscene and desperate. Very much looking forward to catching Skinner’s new piece (The Smell of Heavy Rain) at the nearest opportunity.

(Not sure if you want to know but the worst things I saw all year were Frankenstein at the NT and Yes, Prime Minister on the West End. Both utter, irredeemable bollocks I thought…)

Honour Bayes

Jerusalem
Apollo, London 
So Jerusalem’s amazing! Who knew?! Oh wait, the rest of the world did. But if you, like me, have only just caught this outstanding show you’d be going nutty for it too. Mark Rylance has been rightly lauded for a towering performance as Rooster, a complex and compelling figure who could genuinely summon the Gods. Perhaps less gushed over was Jez Butterworth’s play itself which for me was one of the most lyrical and meaty of the 21st Century, and a genuine story for our generation. With Royal Court, West End and Broadway runs under its belt, Ian Rickson succeeded in keeping the energy up and the blood fresh, making every night feel like the first night.

She She Pop and Their Fathers: Testament
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
Experimental German theatre company She She Pop absolutely floored me with their take on King Lear at the Dublin Theatre Festival earlier this year. A deeply personal exploration of parent child relationships, they picked apart Shakespeare’s great tragedy with razor sharp insight. In a twist their fathers performed on stage with them, with both parent and child baring their souls warts and all whilst miraculously avoiding self indulgence at every turn. She She Pop and Their Fathers: Testament was a witty and intelligent deconstruction which made me look intensely not only at my own relationships but illuminated new parts of this classic tale in ways that the Royal Shakespeare Company could only dream of.

Stationary Excess
The Yard, London
Pop up theatre The Yard was one of the most exciting and bold ventures this year. Flying in the face of crippling arts cuts artistic director Jay Miller took a warehouse and converted it into an intimate amphitheatre. For companies there was no hire price, they took home over half the box office and no minimum performance time. Audiences meanwhile never paid more than £10. In a stonking opening weekend I was lucky enough to see Made In China’s effortlessly moving Stationary Excess. Stationary Excess sweetly and baldly showed us Superman as human. Jess sat on a bike madly pushing herself through faster and faster repetitions of peddling. Over the course of 20 minutes, she transformed in front of our eyes from a woman in a lumber jack shirt to a champagne drenched gangsters moll. She talked about her boyfriend and his ability to fly and about cat ladies and heartache. It was small and fragile and made no sense apart from the comic-con coat hanger it rested on, but somehow it dazzled in the simplicity of its emotional and physical exploration of change. A perfect example of The Yard’s brilliance in action and proof that perfect things can come in small packages.

Carmel Doohan

Clybourne Park
Wyndham’s
Tight, dense and immaculately acted, I loved this for its insight, ability to strip away our comforting liberal assumptions and that gloriously well placed joke about tampons and seeing you  next Tuesday.

Jerusalem
Apollo, London
With the very worst seats imaginable, after two far too early hours of queuing that morning, even through the back pain I could see this was a play that would shift the shape of theatre history. Like King Lear in a trailer park this was epic and defied categorization.Nonsensical rants had a way of suddenly acquiring devastating significance and the determined ambiguity of every event left it looping through my mind for weeks afterwards.

Fanta Orange
Finborough, London
This investigated a similar area to Clydeborne Park and although flawed, the writing had moments of real originality, wit and biting truth. It wound terrifying hypocrisy and the making of our modern day mythologies into a scathing and powerful tale.

Written for Time Out

‘A handbag? A handbag?’ Gyles Brandreth titters before breaking into song. Is this Oscar Wilde or Noël Coward doing a party piece impression of him? ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is given new voice in Douglas Livingstone’s musical.

‘A musical?!’, Dame Edith Evans might have exclaimed. But this diluted interpretation does suit an audience already used to giving Wilde’s witticisms and aphorisms a life of their own.

Livingstone’s book and Adam McGuinness and Zia Moranne’s score are classy and character-led. Flora Spencer-Longhurst sparkles in Cecily’s joyful Charleston number ‘Wicked!’ and Miss Prism (Susie Blake) and Dr Chasuble (Edward Petherbridge) cause much hilarity with their reverent courting in ‘It all Began in a Garden’.

Samal Blak’s design, in which gardens grow out of suitcases, is imaginative and stylish and Brandreth makes a regal Lady Bracknell. It’s not exactly ‘My Fair Lady’. But even Wilde would have admired the new-found silliness
in this light-hearted musical.

Runs until 31st December 

In a world full of flying carpets and ugly sisters, Around the World in Eighty Days is a welcome change in our panto-infused festive landscape. Kate Bannister’s cheeky ride reminds you why the Victorians were great and whisks you away at a pace that even Phileas Fogg would envy.

Inspector Fix (a sweetly officious Jonathan Clarkson) has got it into his head that Fogg’s international jaunt is more to do with theft than a gentleman’s bet. He takes the next steamer after our adventurer determined to catch his man. Savage sacrifices and elephant rides are just a few of the scrapes that follow, in an international caper that would make the Pink Panther proud.

Chock-full of makeshift steampunk style, this energetic company takes you around the world in under two hours, bringing colour to every new shore with a couple of saris and some affectionately dodgy accents.

David Mildon makes Fogg’s pedantry look gentlemanly and Emily Lockwood as Princess Aouda is a romantic but no-nonsense heroine. Adrian Salmon brings passion to the party with his cheerfully supercilious manservant, Passpartout, and in a sea of rich travel acquaintances, Brigid Lohrey’s Lady Cromarty is a particularly fruity treat.

Runs until January 7

Written for Time Out

If the second longest running show in the West End was looking a little tired, a rejuvenating orchestral facelift was just what the doctor ordered. Cameron Mackintosh’s ‘little girl’ has shaken off that 1980s synth vibe and finally woken up to the organic noughties. This is a new, richer sound with strong operatic undertones and even the faint echoes of chamber music.

Led by compelling ex-’Phantom…’ Ramin Karimloo as Jean Valjean, this dynamic cast blows a whirlwind through the Queen’s Theatre, hurtling along Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s famous melodrama. Aided by a swirling revolve and John Napier’s stunning constructivist set, we follow Jean Valjean’s journey across France as he attempts to escape his criminal past and make amends.

Hadley Fraser as Javert, Valjean’s fated pursuer, matches Karimloo’s booming vocals and moody stares step for step (at one point rather sweetly causing a premature ovation). Craig Mather and Lisa-Anne Wood do very prettily as lovelorn young leads Marius and Cosette. But it is Alexia Khadime’s soaring ‘On My Own’ that storms the barricades; her plucky and faithful Eponine genuinely pulls at the heartstrings.

For all its legions of fans, there are many who would sniff at this revived ‘Les Miserables’, branding it ‘opera lite’. In a sense they would be right: all this histrionic bombast is only really making soap opera respectable. But so what. This updated and improved production is a real rabble-rouser and while it may be tosh, it’s still stirring, beautifully made Cameron Mackintosh.

Mon-Sat 7.30pm, Wed, Sat Mats 2.30pm

Written for Exeunt

Chris Goode has woken up later than planned and is still waiting for the morning to reveal to him what sort of day this will be “There’s a lot of renegotiation that has to happen…” he is explaining to me “so we’ll do that throughout our conversation, it will be an interesting extra dimension.”

I can’t imagine someone I would rather ‘renegotiate’ my day with. Chatting to Goode on the phone and letting him lead me into new places of thought, I realise this is not a dissimilar experience to watching him recount The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirleyat the BAC last week. When talking to Goode or watching him perform, something about his gentle, funny, self effacing demeanour disarms you until you find you are happily swimming in a sea of what often end up being complex questions.

Whilst this seems to be an intrinsic part of who Goode is personally, he believes that forWound Man and Shirley this style was particularly necessary. “I knew that I was going to be wanting to do something quite ticklish in terms of the story I tell, which if you were to apply it to two characters in a less magic realistic context would be a story that would alarm and disturb people…” In the character of Wound Man (“a character plainly not wholly of this world”) Goode was able to access a world of magical realism which softened the blow of a story that the Daily Mail would have had a field day with. “It helps people to get to a place where at the end of the show they are really rooting for essentially a relationship between a 14 year old boy and a 40 something year old man who just wears pants all day, you know there are a lot of gritty TV dramas that could be made out of that relationship.”

For Goode a large part of telling this story came from a need to encourage understanding that there may be different instances of the same category of event. As a teenager Goode had a close friendship with an older man of a similar sort to our two protagonists and he wanted to tackle the inherent demonization that people like his ‘villain’ the nosy Reg Parsley in his play instantly resort to “…there’s begun to be something really important for me about standing up for the possibility that that kind of relationship is not intrinsically harmful, obviously it’s a very vulnerable situation, it’s one where everyone’s right to be nervous but actually…I think there is a great deal of bravery on both sides of those relationships.”

It’s an incredible thing that in The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley, this thorny subject only really pricks your consciousness with Goode’s down-to-earth yet whimsical style guiding you past those knee jerk reactions. Goode is both really pleased and slightly bemused by the almost universal waves of warmth audiences have given to this relationship “I do sometimes want to go ‘you do realise what I’m saying right? ‘You do realise what you’re cheering for?!’ and that’s kind of great…”

I think back to why I was so whole heartedly prepared to jump into Goode’s world and I keep coming back to its incredible detail. Within an hour the lives of Wound Man and Shirley are revealed before us in marvellous blossoming colour. The ‘clankity-clunk’ that Wound Man makes as he walks down into the cul-de-sac, the description of PE teacher Mr Carpenter-Finch’s silly tracksuit ensembles, OK Potato (the café they hang out in) which is like a Radiohead-themed outpost of Spud-U-Like  or how Shirley transcends his surroundings when he watches the boy he is obsessed with, his fellow long distance runner, Subway Darling. For Goode the key to this was the ‘call back’. “I think part of the sense you have of it being quite a detailed and a filled in sort of world is that there are things you will hear about in one moment that I will go back to 20 minutes later and just touch in with again. There are these rhythms that come back, or lines or phrases that recur and I really like doing that.” It seems interesting that this is a trick that both storytellers and stand-ups can share, automatically creating an immense sense of satisfaction in an audience “…there’s something fun about doing that but also for me it’s a way of creating a universe because it creates a fictional place where the kind of patterns that we find exciting about our own universe, the correspondences and coincidences create a sense of realism within a framework that’s really all about making stuff up.”

It is a world and a story that Goode is at peace with. As a performer who usually encourages and plays with a large amount of uncertainty in his work, part of what he is enjoying is the craftedness involved within the piece “Whatever you’re doing on stage I think you kind of have to own it and I think I’ve too often lacked confidence to really own what I’m doing and that’s why it’s so nice now to do Wound Man because I trust it enough as a story that actually I really love telling. I really love having that connection with an audience and I don’t feel like a dick for doing it and that’s such a treat.” Goode feels a certainty within the story of Wound Man and Shirley which means he has regained his daylight life “I usually tend to have quite dread filled days” he laughs “that hasn’t happened here so I’ve got my days back, normally I would just expect to spend the days before a show biting my nails and scowling at things whilst eating crisps.”

Perhaps this is the loveliest thing about Goode. Like Wound Man he puts himself in painful positions for the benefit of others. A reluctant performer who places himself directly in front of audiences and then removed all safety nets (the original set for Wound Man was much more complex so he could hide behind it) Goode is giving us his all. Maybe that’s why audiences love him so much. Or maybe it’s because he says things like “I realised with some horror in Edinburgh that Wound Man is Prince Charles…he’s the royal personage who turns up in the aftermath of a disaster, stands there and says ‘Ah well how terrible for you all’ and everyone feels a bit better.”

The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley has two extra dates at BAC 29 & 30 December. For more details go here.

Chris Goode’s Hippo World Guest Book is at Stoke Newington International Airport on the 19th December 2011.