I was listening to a couple of colleagues last night discussing whether 2014 truly had been an excellent year for theatre or whether they were indulging in confirmation bias.  I must admit, I haven’t been bright-eyed with the sense of a golden age myself.  And yet, when I look back on the last twelve months, I find that in a year when I have seen far fewer shows than usual – little more than a hundred in all, due in part to having taken two entire months off, one of which would normally have been partly spent taking in five shows a day on the Edinburgh Fringe – I have given twice as many five-star reviews as I’d normally expect to, namely four.


I realised a few years ago that – despite my repeatedly arguing that it’s not a reviewer’s job to advise readers on whether or not to go to a show, but rather to inform them what it’s like so that those in a position to be able to go can make up their own minds – that at either end of the scale I was engaging in advocacy, to see or not to see.  For me, then, I’d say that a five-star rating means not only that a show is excellent but that it’s in some way important that it be seen.  (And, of course, the opposite for one or, God help us, no stars at all; 2014 has yielded only one one-star production for me, namely Made In Dagenham.)


My fives this year have had their own peculiar virtues.  Anya Reiss’s adaptation of Spring Awakening for Headlong brilliantly remade Frank Wedekind’s play a century on, by identifying that adults still, well-meaningly but stupidly, equate innocence with ignorance for their children, and that teenagers can still be systematically kept in ignorance in vital areas even in what is otherwise a world of information overload.  She and director Ben Kidd gave form to the youngsters’ attempts to understand by having the adolescent characters deliberately dress up to play the grown-ups in their own lives, and then having them dispute the versions each other are acting out.  In my FT predecessor Alastair Macaulay’s terms this was a classic not so much in a good state of repair as given a rebuild by master craftsmen.

You’ve no doubt realised by now that I’m a huge intellectual snob. One manifestation of this is that I have a soft spot for plays that tackle egregiously intelligent subject matter and give it human life.  This was Nick Payne’s achievement in Incognito.  As soon as I heard a character in it observe, “The brain is a storytelling machine and it’s really, really good at fooling us,” I think part of me fell a little in love with a play that itself loved both our capacity for creating personal narratives and our ability to kid ourselves that these personal stories amounted to consistent, continuous personalities.  A decade or so ago, Mick Gordon created a play entitled On Ego that similarly examined our sense of our own identity, but in that case you never lost awareness that it was demonstrating a thesis; Payne’s people are people, that we can live with, even as he’s showing us how that’s not true.


My third high-point of the year was in some ways a personal-generational matter.  Having grown up with the record collection of a sister some 16 years older than me, and having inherited a lot of it when she died, I’m a pop kid of the early ’60s as much as of my own awakening a decade or more later.  One of my early faves in Linda’s singles collection was “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” by The Kinks.  To see Joe Penhall’s telling of that band’s story, Sunny Afternoon, was to relive a youth that had never quite been mine but was still dear to me.  Penhall cannily took a step back from the personal involvement that had flawed songwriter Ray Davies’ own attempts to tell his story onstage, and just as astutely, the greatest-hits-jukebox element of song selection was blended with a keen ear for lesser known songs that fitted in with the story being told.  It’s simply immensely enjoyable.

And the fourth and most recent combines the key elements of all the others: the expert remaking of a classic work, a downright sexy amount of cleverness and big fun.  But I shouldn’t anticipate matters, since its reviews will appear in our next issue.  The show is 1927’s Golem…
    
Written for Theatre Record.