2011: We Need To Talk About Grandage and Guvnors

And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how.

It was a terrific year in general for Rickson, whose West End revival of The Children's Hour made a lasting case for Lillian Hellman's surpassingly bleak play, one whose potential tilt towards melodrama in the hands of Rickson and a blazing cast (including Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss, pictured below right) landed instead in a landscape of psychic terror suggestive of the bleaker environs of Beckett. I shan't soon forget the visual and emotional limbo in which Moss and Keira Knightley, playing two schoolteachers at a New England boarding school who are isolated first from society and then from one another, found themselves by play's end. 

Rickson returned to the same West End house with a summer reappraisal of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, an ever-shimmering play served up with renewed power by the knockout trio of Kristin Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall, and the blistering Ben Miles, the last-named playing the husband, Robert, like a deliberately gruff-voiced version of the playwright himself. (Dramatists were channelled elsewhere on the West End, by the way, Peter Capaldi's faux-professor in The Ladykillers sounding for all the world like none other than Tom Stoppard.)

Staying with directors, the clarity and vigour that marked out Michael Grandage's Donmar tenancy of nearly a decade was nowhere more marked than with his farewell production at that address of Richard II, Redmayne's fallen monarch honouring both the petulant ruler and the wounded manchild that rest within this most lyrically ravishing of roles. (The rest of the cast was pretty great, too, not least the ever-flinty Ron Cook, one of this director's more essential mainstays.) And lest it sound like sobriety and self-seriousness were the order of the day, I can't decide whether I laughed more at Jamie Glover's shoelace-related antics in Noises Off or Tom Edden tumbling repeatedly into the abyss in One Man, Two Guvnors. It's quite possible that a single arched eyebrow from Oliver Chris in Richard Bean's Goldoni rewrite was the year's funniest single image of all.

2011 highlight: Away from the theatre, I was transfixed by Tilda Swinton, whose performance in We Need to Talk About Kevin marks her career-best, even if Meryl-doing-Maggie remains the star turn to beat for the 2012 Oscars. (Runner-up: Lisa Batiashvili blazing her way with hair-raising passion through Shostakovich at the Proms: see YouTube link to her affinity to the seismic Russian composer below.)

2011 letdown: Hmmm. It's a battle for last place between two musical duds. The Menier Chocolate Factory's Pippin represented a bad idea done with startling lack of finesse (even if Harry Hepple sang nicely in the title role). Not to be outdone, a new musical called Ex at the Soho Theatre failed to mark the spot beyond featuring in Gerard Carey's putative playboy, Jack, perhaps the single least appealing character I have ever come across centre-stage.

2012 recommendation: Onstage, comedy looks set to reign supreme, though not without a taste of the bittersweet. I eagerly await West End revivals of both Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends, directed by Jeremy Herrin, and Noel Coward's gloriously subversive Hay Fever, starring Lindsay Duncan as the narcissistic matriarch par excellence.

Watch Lisa Batiashvili perform Shostakovich