It was a year when much of the real drama took place offstage. The best news was that the Arts Council of England is pumping an extra £25m into theatre. Scotland and Wales still seem strapped for cash, but at least English regional and touring theatres can now plan ahead.
Even more dramatic was the spate of resignations from top artistic jobs: the Almeida, Donmar Warehouse, Hampstead Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse are all up for grabs. And if you want conflict and tension from theatre, you certainly got it in spades at the RSC, where Adrian Noble's vision of a restructured company and a rebuilt Stratford complex produced division rather than unity.
On stage, the most significant aspect of the year was the steady revival of plays from the recent past. Pinter's No Man's Land and The Homecoming, Nichols's Privates on Parade and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Friel's Faith Healer and Rudkin's Afore Night Come, even Osborne's Luther (though not everyone responded as warmly as I did) reminded us of the strength of our theatre's back catalogue. It would be foolish to be woozily nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, but all these plays are the work of authors with piercingly individual, poetic voices. There are good writers around today, of course, but I often get the feeling, particularly in studio spaces, that I'm watching variations on the same play: the daughter vehemently at odds with her mother, the anal-penetration piece accompanied by the ritual spit on the hands.
In a modest year for new writing, a few works emerged from the pack. Alistair Beaton's Feelgood proved that, even in an apathetic age, there's a huge hunger for political satire, if only someone had the gumption to supply it. The Right Size's The Play What I Wrote was not just a delirious act of homage to Eric and Ernie; it became a meditation on comedy and on the touching inter-dependence at the heart of all double acts. And Mark Ravenhill's Mother Clap's Molly House was a penetrative piece in more senses than one, transcending the cliches of the studio gay play to ask whether the heady exuberance of sexual liberation had given way to a creepingly conformist alternative lifestyle.
What cheered me most, however, was that much of the liveliest new writing originated outside London. Alan Ayckbourn, whom we lazily take for granted as if he were an unstoppable force of nature, came up with a very impressive Scarborough trilogy - GamePlan, FlatSpin and RolePlay - performed by a permanent company and dealing with the moral consequences of living in a gain-driven society. And by a bitter irony, the Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the very moment when it is to be closed down and rebuilt, showed just why it should be left as it is: it housed important new plays by Peter Whelan, David Edgar and, most startlingly of all, Martin McDonagh. More on his blackly brilliant The Lieutenant of Inishmore when it moves to London next week.
A few new, promising voices also emerged: Gregory Burke with Gagarin Way at the Edinburgh Traverse and the Cottesloe, Suzy Almond with School Play at the Soho Theatre, and Torben Betts with a clutch of works, including A Listening Heaven and Clockwatching, in London and Scotland.
On the directorial front, there were also some striking shows from the international avant-garde. Robert Wilson's version of Strindberg's Dream Play, part of the Barbican's invaluable Bite season, gave us a hypnotic series of painterly tableaux invoking artists as different as Magritte and Andrew Wyeth. Robert Lepage's one-man play The Far Side of the Moon magically explored inner and outer space. And Simon McBurney's The Noise of Time, a collaboration between Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet, made us listen to Shostakovitch's final sombre string quartet with newly attentive ears. What these shows all had in common was that they combined theatrical expressiveness with emotional depth.
In the domestic arena, it was a particularly good year for the Young Vic, which was strangely excluded from the lottery-financed rebuilding bonanza. I found Richard Jones's version of Pirandello's Six Characters Looking for an Author a bit tricksy, but it certainly made us re-examine this 1920s masterpiece. David Lan's production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun was, in contrast, a glowing testament to domestic realism. And Rufus Norris's revival of Rudkin's Afore Night Come deployed a highly imaginative set by Ian McNeil that used myriad light bulbs to evoke a Worcestershire pear orchard.
For all these sporadic successes, there was nevertheless a strange feeling for much of the year that the theatre was simply marking time. What changed all that, obviously, was September 11. And tragic as the events were, they have offered our theatre a vital chance for reappraisal. Dramatists can no longer take refuge in cosily privatised experience - they have to find some way of acknowledging the public world. And the West End, no longer able to rely on a regular influx of US visitors, urgently needs to appeal to the affluent young who nightly throng the pubs and clubs of the capital.
Even if it has been an up-and-down year for new work, it has been a vintage year for acting. Just think about it: Lindsay Duncan in Mouth to Mouth, Fiona Shaw in Medea, Penelope Wilton in The Little Foxes, Victoria Hamilton in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Deborah Findlay in Mother Clap's Molly House, Helen McCrory in Platonov, Ian McDiarmid in Faith Healer, Joseph Fiennes in Edward II, Rufus Sewell in Luther, Samuel West in Hamlet, Ian Holm in The Homecoming, John Wood and Corin Redgrave in No Man's Land. And among the new names, I also spy a future star in Alison Pargeter, who shone so brightly in Ayckbourn's Scarborough trilogy. Our actors are as good as any in the world. What we need are new plays that will stretch their talents.
