1. Young Chekhov
Chichester Festival theatre
Chekhov wrote so few plays, which are revived so often, that it seemed unlikely there could be new discoveries to be made in his work. However, the strategy of fashioning a trilogy from three early works – Platonov, Ivanov and The Seagull – provided a tremendous and revelatory eight hours of theatre in Jonathan Kent’s stagings of David Hare’s adaptations.
As the work now known as Platonov was never staged in his life, Chekhov could never have envisaged this conjunction of productions. The effect is a sort of critical biography through performance, taking us inside the Russian playwright’s brain as he first sketches and then perfects types (trapped radicals, hopeless doctors, deluded schoolteachers) and situations (the insolvent homestead, the slow-burn love affair) that will ultimately put him in a tie with Ibsen for the title of the second greatest playwright after Shakespeare.
The dialogue has a familiar Hare snap – “A ton of iron went into the construction of that face” – but maintains a sensible line between fidelity and modern idiom. Some actors appear in one or two productions – James McArdle doubling a doctor in Ivanov with a magnificent magnificent tragicomic turn as the romantic philanderer, Platonov – while others are in everything. Olivia Vinall, who had begun the year with a powerful performance as a young woman with doubts about atheism in Tom Stoppard’s critically underrated play The Hard Problem, fulfilled her rich potential in what might be called a Masha-up of Chekhovian female roles, impressively finding different registers of desire and despair in each of the characters.
A very strong year for Hare pieces – that also included a smart new play The Moderate Soprano (Hampstead) and a frank memoir, The Blue Touch Paper (Faber) – was crowned by this project, which is expected to have a deserved showing at the National Theatre in 2016. Read the review
2. Greeks
The Almeida, London
In another tripling that would surprise the originators of the material, Rupert Goold, artistic director of the Almeida, and two other directors (James Macdonald and Robert Icke) reimagined for today the Oresteia of Aeschylus and Bakkhai and Medea by Euripides. Finding numerous topical resonances in the slipperiness of leaders, the ruthlessness of lovers and fights between rival ways of living, the project happily married state-of-the-art digital technology with other stage practices 2,500 years old. Viscerally memorable performances included the Klytemnestra of Lia Williams, Kate Fleetwood’s Medea and Bertie Carvel’s Pentheus. Read more
3. Temple
Donmar Warehouse, London
Inspired by the ecclesiastical and policing crisis created when Occupy London staged an anticapitalist protest outside St Paul’s cathedral in 2011-12, this play by Steve Waters was not a docudrama: the central characters, the Dean, the Bishop and the Canon Chancellor are exemplars of spiritual positions rather than formal biographical portraits. This creative leeway added to the power of a work that also avoided the most obvious routes of sentimentalising the protestors and satirising the clerics, accepting the sincerity of Anglican beliefs. In the best examination of the politics of faith since Hare’s Racing Demon, Simon Russell Beale, in a performance nuanced and affecting even by his high standards, used skills honed in classical acting to make the Dean into a modern tragic hero. Read the review
4. Waiting for Godot
Happy Days international Beckett festival, Enniskillen
Séan Doran’s enterprising annual celebration of the works of Samuel Beckett and one sympathetic other writer (this year, TS Eliot) offered the treat of a visit from the Berliner Ensemble, the Bayern Munich of European theatre, with their production of Waiting for Godot. Expecting no surprises from a play I’d seen a dozen times before, I was startled to find that the Germans had somehow persuaded the notoriously strict Beckett estate to allow the introduction of an extra character and several original bits of business. The core of the experience, though, was performances from actors who have been playing the parts for so many years that their characters have become not even a second skin but subcutaneous. The Enniskillen performance was almost even more radical than planned: Pozzo’s taxi had failed to turn up at the hotel and I gave him a lift just in time for the start. Read more
5. Camelot: The Shining City
Sheffield Crucible
For this ambitious and enthralling collaboration between the Slung Low company, the Crucible and Sheffield People’s Theatre, dramatist James Phillips adapted the Arthurian legend to a contemporary setting in which a rebel leader uses social media to foment a revolution. The first part ended with the Crucible “burning down”, and the audience being escorted outside, where the cast and 150 local extras carried the narrative into two different parts of the city. Turning out to be impressively prophetic of the anti-establishment anger that would drive Corbyn’s outsider landslide in the Labour leadership election just two months later, the production was a masterclass in how a theatre can engage with its community and stands as a highlight of the repertoire that has just won Sheffield artistic director Daniel Evans the job of running the Chichester Festival theatre. Read the review
6. The Motherfucker with the Hat
National Theatre, London
Although that title made it hard for the media to talk about, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s savage comedy of multicultural distrust and the different definitions of decency in 21st-century America was worth shouting about. The musically precise dialogue went even beyond David Mamet in showing that there can be a beauty in ugly words spoken and shouted in the theatre. Indu Rubasingham’s production, far superior to the 2011 Broadway premiere, successfully kept the play at a daring pace and cohered a cast from disparate backgrounds into an ensemble that felt coherently American. Seven months on, the memory of certain moments and lines still makes me laugh. Read the review
7. Gypsy
Savoy theatre, London
Stephen Sondheim has often sounded somewhat equivocal about his 1959 musical, possibly because it is one of the few pieces for which he provided words for music by another composer (Jule Styne). However, this Chichester production by Jonathan Kent showed, during its acclaimed and award-winning West End run, that the frequent tension between Sondheim’s astringent lyrics and Styne’s soaring score make this a fascinating example of two different American showbiz traditions combining to dramatise a third – touring burlesque. As the ultimate nightmare showbiz mother, Imelda Staunton’s full-throttled and total-bodied performance put her in the position of being able to choose whatever she wants to do next in theatre, sung or spoken, in London or New York. Read the review
8. King John
London, Northampton, Salisbury and Shakespeare’s Globe
Delivered with impeccable clarity of narrative and language, James Dacre’s version of one of the least-performed tragedies of Shakespeare – though increasingly seeming one of his most astute depictions of political intrigue – gained tremendous additional impact from being performed by candlelight in famously atmospheric churches. While the production was timed to coincide with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the scenes from Anglo-French history took on other haunting subtexts in a year when England’s ties with Europe have come both further apart (through the pre-referendum debate on EU membership) and closer together, after the Paris atrocities. Read the review
9. People, Places and Things
National Theatre, London
There are times at the moment when almost every production seems to be about showbiz in some way, but Duncan Macmillan’s play made the most unexpectedly bleak and powerful use of a backstage setting by charting the progress through treatment for addiction (to drink, drugs and possibly sex) of an actress who imploded during a Chekhov performance. Denise Gough, often seeming to be acting at the very edge of disintegration, gave a name-making performance as a vulnerable woman whose claims (even about her own name) can never be trusted. In the US, this story would have ended with redemption; Macmillan was allowed to finish with a distressing question mark. The commercial transfer – to Wyndham’s, London, from 15 March – is a 2016 hot ticket. Read the review
10. The Winter’s Tale
Garrick, London
The opening show in the West End residency of Kenneth Branagh’s new company builds high hopes of even greater highlights next year. Branagh’s Leontes, with its newly illuminating line-stresses and convincing psychological collapse, is matched by the peerless stage presence and verse-speaking of Judi Dench, doubling the roles of Paulina and Time. As is the case with all the best productions of this dramatist, Branagh and co-director Rob Ashford prompted an emergency reshuffle of my top 10 favourite Shakespeare plays. Read the review
• This article was amended on 5 January 2016. An earlier version said James McArdle was in only one production of the Young Chekhov season at Chichester Festival theatre. McArdle was in two of the season’s plays: Ivanov and Platonov.
