Striking dramas stand out in 2014: Rounding up the year's best shows

The newspaper clipping in front of me says I was “dazzled” by In Time O’ Strife, so I can hardly do other than identify the production of this rarely seen Scottish work as one of the highlights of my theatregoing during 2014. The highlight, I think.

Joe Corrie’s play, dating from 1926, the year of the General Strike, was revived by the National Theatre of Scotland to mark the 30th anniversary of the Thatcher government’s victory in the Miners’ Strike of 1984.

Corrie, a miner himself, focused in the drama on a Fifeshire community being starved into submission by the local coal barons. I wrote: “As the adapter, director and designer, Graham McLaren delivers a production in barnstorming Brechtian style. Corrie’s story, focusing on two mining families many months into a crippling strike, is presented as if performed at an unspecified later period by amateur actors in a village hall.”

In the week that review appears, in early October, my colleague Giles Woodforde was likewise awarding a five-star accolade to a co-production of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days by the Theatre, Chipping Norton, and Oxfordshire Theatre Company.

“Acted with tremendous verve,” he wrote, “the sheer inventiveness employed in this highly entertaining production is mind-boggling. Everyone will have their favourite scene — mine was the perilous voyage home across the Atlantic with the ship running out of fule. What’s left to feed the boiler?”

Earlier in the year, as Giles sang the praises of Stories for Survival, an Arabian Nights adaptation at the always inventive Pegasus Theatre, I was being “thrilled” — five stars again — by English Touring Theatre’s sensational adaptation of Brien Friel’s masterly play, Translations.

“Failure of communication,” I wrote, “is a major theme of the play, which is presented as perfectly as it could be under the director James Grieves. It hardly needs saying, of course, that it serves, too, as a powerful metaphor for Ireland’s dangerous political divisions.”

Oxford Playhouse supplied inspirational theatre throughout the year, some of it with a powerful political dimension. This was certainly the case with Stella Feehily’s This May Hurt a Bit, focusing on the National Health Service, which earned a five-star review from Angie Johnson.

The Out of Joint production, under the legendary director Max Stafford-Clark, starred the great Stephanie Cole, who is, Angie wrote, a “national treasure” to rival the NHS. She played Iris, who is visited by her daughter Meriel and son-in-law Hank, a product of the American heatlthcare industry. “When he disparages the NHS, the venerable Iris is its funny, wise and sharp champion.”

The North Wall in Summertown is another hugely important venue for drama. In early October its praises were being sung by Angie with its home-grown production Fast Track. This was developed from work done by the North Wall outreach programme which brought together writer Catriona Kerridge and director Lucy Maycock. “It is a contemporary play,” Angie wrote, “focusing on the impact of the economic recession on young people. It’s very funny at times but the dark side of this story lurks very near to the surface throughout.”

Fast Track: Archie Rush, Emma Dennis-Edwards and Fumilayo Brown-Olateju at North Wall 

The North Wall also supplied a highlight of my reviewing year in a production of Nick Payne’s Incognito from Nabokov, Live Theatre and Hightide Festival Theatre.

I wrote: “Where Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn led [by introducing science into their work], Nick Payne is now following. Quantum Mechanics loomed large in his award-winning West End hit Constellations, and in his excellent new play the focus is on neuroscience.

“Fused with astonishing economy in the play are the bizarre story of the theft in 1955 of of Albert Einstein’s brain by pathologist Thoas Stoltz Harvey and an account of a pioneering operation performed in Bath at around the same time on epileptic Henry.”

While Oxford’s New Theatre remained the place for the big one-night stands and the top musicals, ballets and operas, it reverted to its old style just once in the year with a rare straight play, The Full Monty.

Previously seen in the West End, the piece was adapted from the hit movie by its writer Simon Beaufoy, who now lives in Oxford.

I wrote in my review: “I was surrounded in the stalls by as joyful a crowd as I’ve seen there in ages. Many were women in hen party mode, doubtless drawn by the recognised ‘phwoar’ factor of Gary Lucy, of Footballers’ Wives and Hollyoaks fame, who plays the main role of Gaz. He proves, however, to be much more than a handsome face and, indeed, rippling torso. His rapport with other members of the cast, and especially with Fraser Kelly, the confident 12-year-old playing Gaz’s son Nathan, shone out at Monday’s opening night.

Full Monty: Starring Gary Lucy (centre)

Feelgood, for sure.”

“Enslaved by poker” was the eye-catching headline on one of my reviews back in June. This concerned the production of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice by Northampton’s Royal&Derngate Theatre, which later toured to Oxford Playhouse.

I wrote that a knowledge of the rules of poker would be useful for any prospective audience member. “But if you are without one, all is not lost. You need merely to understand, as Marber clearly does, that poker is a game that makes fools of the people that become slaves to it, and paupers too.”

A sensitive and moving adaptation of Pat Barker’s Regeneration novels, by Nicholas Wright, was another of the Royal&Derngate’s productions to visit Oxford, in a timely revival to mark the outbreak of the First World War, during which the action is set, at a hospital in Edinburgh.

I wrote: “Harrowing in its depiction of shattered lives, the play also has much to say about the creative process. From Siegfried Sassoon, impeccably portrayed by Tim Delap, comes a masterclass in poetry writing as he aids younger writer (and hero worshipper) Wilfred Owen (Garmon Rhys) in the composition of what became his Anthem for Doomed Youth.