Guardian Theatre Blog

Josie Rourke: From Dennis Kelly's political rigour to Anthony Weigh's bold rejection of conventions, Harold Pinter is unquestionably in the DNA of today's dramatists

The first week of the new year is ushered in with a whimper rather than a bang. If you are looking for new work, then your choices are pretty limited. Maybe it's time to catch up with shows you've missed. If you've got children, I'd really recommend Cinderella at the Lyric, How Long Is a Piece of String? (at the Unicorn this weekend, then moving to Theatr Clwyd) and Travelling Light's Home, a sort of Beckett play for little ones, which marks the temporary reopening of the Bristol Old Vic in a style that genuinely brings the community into the building.

On my way back from seeing Home in Bristol, I popped into The Egg in Bath for a hugely enjoyable Nutcracker. I'm sorry to admit that it was the first time I'd been to The Egg. I'll certainly be going back, not least because it is a brilliant space designed by Haworth Tompkins. This architectural practice, which is working closely with BAC on its Playground projects, redesigned the National Theatre studio and has just won the bid to develop a design strategy for the National Theatre.

That brings me nicely to this month's first Devoted and Disgruntled session, which is about theatre and architecture. David Rosenberg of Shunt will be exploring why more and more theatre artists are working outside the constraints of the auditorium, and asking if we should be getting rid of our glorious theatrical heritage brick by brick. There's more information is on the Improbable website, where you can also find details of another weekend Devoted and Disgruntled event that takes place in Bethnal Green on 10-12 January. There is no more invigorating way to start the new year.

There are some new shows opening in London this week. At the Old Vic, Richard Dreyfuss leads an all-star cast in the Kevin Spacey-directed Complicit, Joe Sutton's drama about press freedom. The Ian Dury two-hander Hit Me! goes into the Leicester Square theatre this week. It's a very partial account but is enlivened by a spookily effective performance from Jud Charlton as the great man. Downstairs at the same theatre, there is a stage version of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. I often comfort myself by trying to pretend that the photo accompanying my blogposts is my own personal picture in the attic ...

I'm intrigued to see that there is a rare revival of Sylvia Plath's poem play Three Women at Jermyn Street from Tuesday. I know it well, having directed it myself while at school, a choice that did not go down entirely well with the nuns. Still, at least I didn't choose Fucking Men, an American comedy that briefly played the Finborough last year and is now going into the King's Head in a production by Phil Willmott. The Finborough has an opening too: a rare revival of Captain Oates' Left Sock, first produced at the Royal Court in 1969. Great title — let's hope it's a great play. It will be interesting to see how much Steve Thompson's Roaring Trade (in previews at Soho) has its finger on the financial pulse, as it follows a group of bond traders facing meltdown.

At the Arcola, In Blood is a Brazilian-inspired version of The Bacchae and stars Greg Hicks. Also at the Arcola, later in the month, is Hotel Medea, a six-hour promenade version of the Greek myth. The performance begins at midnight and finishes as dawn breaks. The end of the week sees the start of the London International Mime Festival, which looks fab — so get booking or you will miss out.

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Oh dear. This time last year I blogged a series of five cultural resolutions for 2008. Looking back, I think I kept only two of them. I can plead mitigating circumstances. I spent much of my spare time in the first half of the year trailing round the book festivals plugging State of the Nation. And, in the autumn, I directed a Pinter triple bill with LAMDA students: a blissfully happy experience but one that devoured most of my time.

So where did I fall down? Principally, in resolving to see more movies and exhibitions and explore modern dance. With movies, I am only mildly repentant. After spending five nights a week watching plays, my appetite for sitting in darkened auditoria diminishes: especially when, as with commercial cinema, you are surrounded by noisy popcorn-crunchers. I did see two great oldies - Pabst's magnificent Pandora's Box and Chabrol's Le Beau Serge - in the comfort of the Barbican and the Lumiere. I still aim to catch Garrone's Gomorrah and eagerly anticipate Daldry's The Reader. But, after reading Peter Bradshaw's and Philip French's columns, I sense that modern cinema is filled with what John Osborne once called "an effluence of celluloid."

I feel much more guilty about exhibitions and modern dance. I mean to get to Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery very soon but could kick myself for missing the Russian show and Hammershoi at the Royal Academy, and Peter Doig at Tate Britain. As for dance, I feel sorry about not slotting in the return of Wuppertal Tanztheater, whom I first saw at the Adelaide Festival in 1982 – long before most London dance critics. At least I can claim, on the operatic front, I got to Harrison Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: a brilliantly dramatic and accessible piece, assured of a place in the canon.

But, going back to the resolutions, I did read more modern novels this year. Not new-minted ones but I did catch up, long after everyone else, with Jonathan Coe. His What A Carve Up struck me as the best dissection of the devastating effect of Thatcherism I have ever come across: also, as aficionados will know, a wonderful postmodern mix of cinematic and literary allusion. After that, I dived into Coe's The Rotters' Club, which catches perfectly the angst of adolescence in the 70s.

I also would claim, modestly, to have stuck to my resolution to be "open to experiment without succumbing to fashionable trendiness." I remained stonily unmoved, for instance, by Katie Mitchell's attempt in ... some trace of her (notice the pretensions of the lower-case title) to turn Dostoevsky's The Idiot into a piece of live cinema. Conversely, I loved (though others didn't) Enda Walsh and Theatre O's freewheeling version of The Brothers Karamazov, Delirium, which caught something of the vertiginous madness of the original. So where does that leave me? Remorseful about my continuing cultural gaps but resolving to do better next year.

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Plus: will The Toxic Avenger Musical cross the pond, and what will become of Connie Fisher?

Yes, I know I've already had my light-hearted bite at the best and worst of the year, but as I've been mulling over my nominations for the annual Critics' Circle Awards I'm coming back for seconds, even if I do stand accused of having my cake and eating it too. Not least, because past experience tells me that very few of my Critics' Circle nominations actually get the gong because while many of my colleagues gaggle in the same places, I'm often in another part of the country or, indeed, theatrical universe.

This led to the odd situation last year, in a pretty thin year for playwrighting, where Complicite's A Disappearing Number walked off with the 2007 Critics' Circle best play award, while Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters (which I saw in Newcastle at Live Theatre last Autumn and which got my vote), didn't figure because so few critics had seen it. Hall's play transferred into the National this year, where it was widely admired and went on to win the Evening Standard award for best play. But because it's not new, it is ineligible for this year's Critics' Circle awards, so what is undoubtedly one of the finest plays of recent years will go unrewarded by the critics themselves.

Such quirks will, of course, always occur in any awards process, whether it is the horse trading that takes place in committee-style affairs such as the Evening Standard or the Peter Brook Awards (of which I'm part), or the one person, one-vote system of the Critics' Circle. At least the latter has broadened its membership substantially and now includes more regional and online journalists.

So here goes with some of my suggestions for the best shows of the year. Best play is undoubtedly Simon Stephens's Harper Regan, a knotty and difficult but immensely rewarding play (for those of us who stayed after the interval), that has an Ibsenite authority and a terrifying honesty in its exploration of our relationships with the people we love most.

In fact, it was Stephens's year all round because he had two other crackers (Pornography, which I would just love to see in an European production), and Sea Wall as part of the Bush Broken Space season. The latter was a bare 20 minutes long but three months on, this tale of a blessed life broken still haunts me. Writing of Stephens's quality garners superb performances with Lesley Sharp in electrifying form as a woman running towards the truth of her life in Harper Regan, and Andrew Scott giving a spine-tingling performance in Sea Wall.

Harper Regan is not the only new play that deserves accolades, and not the only one wrestling with the pain, need and power exchanges in human relationships. Robert Holman's quietly devastating Jonah and Otto at the Royal Exchange really should have come to London, particularly as it boasted two extraordinary performances by Ian McDiarmid and Andrew Sheridan. Sheridan, by the way, is one of the winners of this year's Bruntwood playwrighting competition with Before the Echoes Die Away. The final winner of the last Bruntwood competition got its premiere at the Exchange this year and proved to be wayward and messy but endearingly honest: Phil Porter's The Cracks in My Skin.

Most promising playwright of the year in my book is Ali Taylor for Cotton Wool at Theatre503, and Overspill which won the Churchill Bromley's Metamorphosis08 playwrighting competition. I have to confess that I was on the panel for the latter.

Away from new writing, I loved Dreamthinkspeak's One Step Forward, One Step Back (I've just got to assign it a category for the CC awards); I reckon that Slung Low which won the Samuel Beckett Award with Helium is definitely a company to watch, and I enjoyed Hoipolloi's Edward Gorey show, The Doubtful Guest. Ridiculusmus were on top form with Tough Time, Nice Time; David Hoyle's Magazine nights at the Vauxhall Tavern were dangerously addictive, and Station House Opera got rid of the technology and found itself again with Mind Out. Giffords Circus's Caravan was just a lovely treat, and Kneehigh's Brief Encounter was clever and had a big heart.

I Am Falling at the Gate was dance theatre of exceptional quality. Belgian company Ontroerend Goed took Edinburgh and London by storm with Once and For All, and Fevered Sleep's Brilliant and Oily Cart's How Long is a Piece of String? were both seriously experimental pieces of theatre that would win awards if adults had been their target audience rather than the under-fives.

The best classic revivals were from those who came with respect but not too much reverence: Thomas Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler; Erica Whyman's 1950s style A Doll's House; Frantic Assembly's modern, pub bouncer Othello, and Chris Goode's Sisters at the Gate – the most reinvigorated theatre of the last 12 months. Yes, there were cast to the hilt and wholly admirable classic revivals at the Donmar, the Almeida and Wyndhams, and if what you want is assured quality, they delivered it by the bucketful, but I like more whiff of danger with my Strindberg, Chekhov and Shakespeare. We got it in Jamie Ballard's quick-witted and mercurial Hamlet as part of the annual Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory season in Bristol in a production by Jonathan Miller that was plain but never safe. And David Calder was a fine King Lear at the Globe. Let me know what I've overlooked.

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Maxie Szalwinska: This may be the time of year to reflect on the best productions of the last 12 months, but don't forget the shows so bad they're good

On Wednesday, the Stage will publish its annual list of those it considers the 100 most influential people in British theatre. In the meantime, it has published a list of lists, totting up the league positions of those heading the annual top 100 over the last 10 years.

The winner is Andrew Lloyd Webber, followed by Cameron Mackintosh and then producers Howard Panter and David Ian. In joint fifth place come Nick Thomas of the Qdos group, the world's largest producer of pantomimes and touring shows, and Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre.

That particularly bizarre pairing gives you an idea of the annual list's bent, and is a reminder that what the Stage means by influence doesn't necessarily tally with other people's definitions – certainly not mine.

The Stage list clearly emphasises those who produce commercial theatre, or who own real estate or a stake in reality TV shows. Yes, these people are rich and powerful, but the dominance of money men (only one woman, producer Sonia Friedman, makes it into the top ten) emphasises the Stage's preference for wheeler dealers over theatre makers. These people are just as likely to be found sitting and counting cash as putting on shows. Many are engaged in embalming theatre rather than liberating it.

Last year, Lee Mead and Daniel Radcliffe both made the Stage's top 100, a result rendered less preposterous by the surprise joint appearance in 10th place of Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany of the National Theatre of Scotland. They have made a huge impact, not just on Scottish theatre, but on the way we think about what a national theatre is, and its place in the cultural life and theatre ecology of a nation.

Now that is what I call genuine influence – and where the Stage and I really part company. While they see influence coming from the knighted, the wealthy and theatre's establishment stamping-grounds, my feeling is that influence in theatre works the other way round. Those with least money and least power are the real pioneers. What grassroots theatre is doing today, the mainstream will be nicking in some form tomorrow.

So I'd like to hear who you think should be in 2008's list of the most influential figures in theatre today, and why. To start you thinking, here – in no particular order – are some of my own nominations.

I'll start with Felix Barrett, Maxine Doyle and Colin Marsh of Punchdrunk, whose Masque of the Red Death and other shows are already having a marked influence on a rising generation of theatre makers; David Jubb and David Micklem at BAC, who are intent on liberating artists and audiences from the constraints of formal theatre spaces, and who are doing more than anyone to encourage tomorrow's theatre makers and producers; and Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb of Artichoke, who proved with La Machine that they are more than the Sultan's Elephant.

Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson and Nick Sweeting of Improbable, through Devoted and Disgruntled and pioneering use of Open Space technology, have changed the way that theatre thinks and talks about itself; Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell have successfully reinvented the Gate, and understood the potential of bringing dance and theatre closer; and David Farr's tenure at the Lyric Hammersmith, in conjunction with Kate McGrath and Louise Blackwell of Fuel, has left a legacy of supported companies and artists.

I'd further nominate Andy Field and Debbie Pearson for breaking the Edinburgh model with their free venue, Forest Fringe; NT producer and director Tom Morris, who has his finger on the pulse; Simon Stephens, who with Harper Regan proved himself a premiership playwright, and one who – as Pornography suggested – is still more than willing to experiment; and Simon Stokes, whose Plymouth co-productions with Frantic Assembly, Chris Goode and Anthony Neilson, among others, are an investment in the future and a reminder that regional theatre really can be ahead of the game.

Finally, Katie Mitchell and Fifty Nine Productions (the National Theatre's youngest associate producers) continue to play constructively with multimedia, while Emma Rice is a worthy nominee for her vision in melding old and new, popular and experimental, the commercial and the subsidised in Brief Encounter.

Now it's your turn. Who do you think have been the real players this year? If you want to broaden it out to cover the last 10 years, then please do.

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As we mourn the passing of one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, let's not forget that the field of human rights has also lost a great defender of freedom of expression. During my time at PEN, Harold Pinter proved indispensable in helping to raise the profile of numerous, lesser well-known, writers in trouble for their work. He never let them down.

Much has been made about Pinter's refusal to tolerate bullying at school. He also took on many of the world's tyrants – however big or small – defending the rights of writers, journalists and human rights activists around the globe by lending his name or wielding his pen. He came to every single demonstration we mounted on behalf of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and when the international campaign to free the outspoken Nigerian writer failed, Pinter condemned his execution on the orders of dictator General Abacha in the strongest possible terms. Pinter and his wife, the author Antonia Fraser, also supported the campaign to free Iranian dissident Faraj Sarkohi – attending most of PEN´s weekly demonstrations – and Pinter the actor took part in a staged reading at the Almeida intended to raise Sarkohi's profile.

When PEN sent petitions to governments protesting at the mistreatment of a writer, Pinter would, inevitably, be one of the first to sign. He remained a harsh critic of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds and its imprisonment of dissident writers. Following Ayotallah Khomeini´s fatwa against Salman Rushdie calling for his death, Pinter led a delegation of British writers to Downing Street, demanding that Margaret Thatcher's government take action over ''an intolerable and barbaric state of affairs.''

In recent years, he was a relentless critic of US government policy; as quick to denounce "American gulags" as he was to condemn the labour camps of Russia or China. As well as giving freely of his time, he was generous with his own writing to help a cause. He often gave PEN an evening during a run of one of his plays in order to raise funds for beleaguered writers. For his 70th birthday celebration at Soho theatre, which featured a host of theatre celebrities paying tribute to the great man, the money raised from tickets sales went to English PEN´s Writers in Prison programme. In his later years he used poetry to rage against injustices. Last year, without hesitation, he contributed his poem, Death, to the PEN anthology, Another Sky.

In return, Pinter expected very little. He did not suffer fools gladly and liked his white wine to be suitably chilled – to the extent that he contributed a fridge to PEN when they had a club bar in former premises.

We mourn a phenomenal playwright who contributed to and helped shape today's theatre. But just as great is the loss of a foremost defender of freedom of expression who fought some of the world's worst dictatorships with words and, more often than not, emerged the victor in the battle against human wrongs.

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Most electrifying performance: Clare Brown's Don't You Leave Me Here at West Yorkshire Playhouse was a smoking account of jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton's relationship with his mentor Buddy Bolden. But the most illuminating moment came when Kelsey Brookfield's Jelly Roll gave us a flash of the bulbs at the end of his winkle-pickers.

Most ludicrously enjoyable line: The Royal Exchange chose to dredge up Philip King's wartime farce, See How They Run. This routine comedy set in a vicarage with lots of people trying to pass themselves off as clergy is redeemed by the moment when someone gets to say: "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars at once."

Most complete disregard of theatrical superstition: Quarantine's Old People, Children and Animals at Contact Manchester gleefully broke every backstage taboo there is. Rumour has it that the company's next project will involve shouting Macbeth and whistling in the dressing room.

Best slightly self-indulgent musical about a legendary post-punk nightclub: Eric's – the Musical at Liverpool Everyman.

Worst slightly self-indulgent musical about a legendary post-punk nightclub: Eric's – the Musical at Liverpool Everyman.

Most unnecessary intervals: Aladdin at Nottingham Playhouse. Come on, guys – how many opportunities does an audience of hyperactive kids need to go out and get tanked up on more fizzy drinks and sweets?

Best performance by a train: York Theatre Royal's production of The Railway Children at the National Railway Museum. For the genuinely thrilling sight of three Edwardian kids trying to flag down 13 tonnes of actual steam engine with their underwear.

Most unattractive merchandise: The 100% acrylic, sky-blue and lemon-yellow replica kits on sale at Horrid Henry – Live and Horrid at Sheffield Lyceum. You could hardly bear to look. And the T-shirt stand was no better either.

Most emphatic confirmation that the world has indeed gone mad: Rufus Norris's West End production of Cabaret went out on national tour – a consolation prize for Samantha Barks, the 17-year-old runner-up in television's find-a-Nancy campaign. She was underage, under-directed and underwhelming as Sally Bowles. Still, she said she'd do anything ...

Worst sightlines: Clean Break's production of Chloe Moss's coming-out-of-prison drama This Wide Night had to fit into numerous small touring venues. None the less, the date at Live theatre in Newcastle was the first time I've watched an entire play from behind a sofa.

Most barefaced cheek: Arnold Wesker's Roots received a welcome 50th-anniversary revival at the Royal Exchange. Problem is, Wesker didn't write it for a theatre-in-the-round, so when Claire Brown's Beattie went behind a screen for a bath, two-thirds of the audience were still exposed to her charms.

Finally, the special Way past my bedtime award: This one goes to the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick for Neil Bartlett's In Extremis. This ponderous two-hander about Oscar Wilde's visit to a clairvoyant was presented as an afterpiece to the Importance of Being Earnest and started at 11pm. You may indeed be feeling very sleepy ...

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The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be.

My own memories of Harold, and it's hard to think of him in more formal terms, are entirely happy. We'd had a relatively distant professional relationship for many years. I'd reviewed his plays, sometimes favourably, sometimes not. (I made a spectacular ass of myself over the original production of Betrayal.) Then in 1992 I was approached by Faber and Faber to write a book about him. What was intended as a short book about his plays and politics turned, thanks to his openness, into a full-scale biography. I talked to Harold himself at great length, to his friends and colleagues. And what I discovered was that his plays, so often dubbed enigmatic and mysterious, were nearly all spun out of memories of his own experience. If they connected with audiences the world over, it was because he understood the insecurity of human life and the sense that it was often based on psychological and territorial battles.

Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.

But, just a few hours after learning of his death, what I chiefly remember is the generosity of the man himself. Harold had a great talent for friendship, as the next few days will surely testify. He also had a remarkable sense of loyalty. Eight weeks ago I directed a group of LAMDA students in a triple-bill of Party Time, Celebration and the Nobel Lecture. At the time, Harold was extremely ill. But he had promised to come and see the productions and, on the final Saturday-night performance, he and his wife, Antonia, duly arrived. They not only saw the shows. Harold got a up and made a speech afterwards thanking all the students. He then stayed on to drink and chat with them. Only later did I realise how much of a physical effort it was for Harold. But it was a golden night for the student-actors and, I have to say, for me too. It was also typical of the man. Harold was a great dramatist and screenwriter, a ferocious polemicist, a fighter against all forms of hypocrisy. What we should also remember today is his generosity of spirit and his rage for life.

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With parliament prematurely prorogued and a spate of wild winter weather dubbed "Snowmaggedon", Canada isn't currently as awesome a country to live in as that Economist cover with the moose wearing sunglasses made it out to be. Still, 2008 wasn't a half-bad year to be a theatre critic here. Here are a few of my favourite offbeat moments ...

Best Leonard Cohen cover version: Forget the overwrought vocal stylings of both Buckley and Burke; Calgary's experimental One Yellow Rabbit theatre company mined the sexuality and humour of Laughing Len's early work in a revival of their hit production Doing Leonard Cohen. Denise Clarke's intoxicating rendition of Suzanne breathed new life into a poem almost as overanalysed as Hallelujah, while the play's second-act adaptation of Beautiful Losers transformed Cohen's obscure 1966 novel into a ribald, riotous crowd-pleaser.

Messiest performance of the year: Wajdi Mouawad using his body as a paintbrush to cover the stage in gallons of paint at the daring and delirious climax of Seuls (which played in Paris, Montreal and Ottawa). The Lebanese-Quebecois playwright's audacious solo show delved deep into the subconscious of Harwan, a student writing his PhD thesis on Robert Lepage – and ended up rivalling some of the best of Lepage's one-man work.

Best Canadian circus that wasn't Cirque de Soleil: Anyone looking for a human-scale, intimate three-ring experience that eschews new-age music should try Montreal's Les 7 Doigts de la Main. My favourite part of the exhilarating Loft, which I saw on tour in Vancouver, was Meaghan Wegg's aerial hoop routine to Coldplay's Amsterdam, one of the most moving pieces of movement I saw this year. (Les 7 doigts are in Paris right now and tour to Sadler's Wells in London in March.)

Most impressive feat of meta-puppetry: Master puppeteer Ronnie Burkett's latest show for adults, Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, may not rank up there with his finest work, but it certainly contains some of his most virtuoso puppetry. The semi-autobiographical show about a washed-up cruise-ship puppeteer features long-strung marionettes that operate tiny short-strung marionettes of their own, and even a scene in which a sock puppet teaches Burkett how to manipulate a puppet. (Billy Twinkle hits the Barbican in March, then tours around the UK.)

Most inadvertent evening of postdramatic theatre: Donna Feore's colourful production of It's A Wonderful Life, adapted into a staged radio play by Phillip Grecian, at Toronto's Canadian Stage Company. Set in a retro radio studio, the Wonderful Life ensemble milled about in character in the background, eating sandwiches, knitting, reading books or sneaking "outside" for a cheeky smoke. The voyeurism of it all, strangely enough, reminded me of the National Theatre's production of Peter Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.

Best premiere delayed by 84 years: Githa Sowerby's 1924 play The Stepmother had its public premiere at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake after spending the better part of a century boxed in the basement of Samuel French in London. Jackie Maxwell's sure-footed production highlighted the best of an entertaining play about a businesswoman scammed out of an inheritance by her gold-digging, spendthrift husband.

Best performance 78 years in the making: Christopher Plummer returned to Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival to star in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. At turns impish and imperial, the septuagenarian's charismatic Caesar veni, vici, vidi-ed the audiences and will soon be coming to screens big and small in North America.

Most twisted sex life of the year: In Hannah Moscovitch's East of Berlin, the son of a Nazi concentration camp doctor tries to assuage his inherited guilt by having a homosexual tryst in his father's study – on Hitler's birthday. He then rebels by proposing to the daughter of Holocaust survivors. It's startling scenarios like this, and not her pyjama-clad pillow-fighting antics, that make Moscovitch Canada's hottest young playwright.

Best illustration of Henri Bergson's theory that laughter stems from "something mechanical encrusted on the living": Toronto veteran Matt Baram as a robotic rebel named CO2PO with anger management issues in the ridiculous climate-change comedy An Inconvenient Musical. You really had to be there.

And finally, the one that isn't Canadian but gets an honourable mention anyway ...

Snarkiest playwright: Neil LaBute. He made a recent appearance here on the Guardian site, but my favourite of his 2008 forays into the blogosphere was when Labute took on one West End Whingers commenter who didn't like Fat Pig. "It's so easy to bitch, Betsy. Even easier to be one. Happily you've succeeded at both." Anyone else wish that blogs had existed while Tennessee Williams was alive?

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Maxie Szalwinska: In my view Douglas Hodge deserves the recognition of a big-name star. Which B-list actors do you think belong at the top?

As the end of the year approaches the impulse is, for many, to make lists, to break things down, to tag and order and assign labels. Maybe it is a sign of an untidy mind, but it is not an impulse I share (my desk attests to this), so instead I offer not a list, but more of a collage; a non-linear clutter of the images that have left an impression on me in this 12-month window.

It begins with Melanie Wilson, gently pressing her palms into dishes of sand at the end of her hypnotic show Iris Brunette at BAC, leaving her mark, a signature in sand. More sand follows, this time tumbling from above and showering the bare head of Jonathan Singer's Richard II in the first of Michael Boyd's history plays to be staged at the Roundhouse: dust and detritus anoint the fallen king, coating his shoulders and powdering the floor at his feet.

Water provides a neat binding device for much of what I saw and loved this year: Ony Uhiara, so striking in her yellow vest and pink running shorts, her image reflected in a mirror-black pool of water in the Young Vic's staging of In the Red and Brown Water; the awful, eel-like thrashing of the fish tank-drowning scene in Rupert Goold's Six Characters in Search of an Author; the final gut-punch of Simon Stephens' Sea Wall, expertly delivered under a lone light bulb during the Bush's Broken Space season, and the angry downpour that battered the opening night of Che Walker's The Frontline at the Globe, an aggressive city-cleansing rain that connected cast and audience as few things can.

Then there was the music of mourning as it fell from the tongues of two young Scottish brothers, left alone in the world after their mother's death, in Ali Taylor's bright Cotton Wool. There was the poetry, sung and spoken, of Zena Edwards in her solo show Security, also at BAC, inhabiting her characters with a shrug of the shoulders, a shift in posture, a wrinkle of the nose.

For all the intelligence and eloquence of Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, the scene that lingers most is Ian Kelly's art tutor sketching his student and friend Oliver Kilbourn in his miner's attire, capturing his likeness in chalk and charcoal. Another moment that has stayed with me is the sudden eruption of the Black Watch soldiers from a pool table, like alien creatures from John Hurt's chest, in John Tiffany's rightly lauded production at the Barbican.

So there you have it: untidy and formless, yes, but an accurate reflection of the things that have stayed with me. Please share your own non-lists of the scenes, images and unexpected pleasures that have branded themselves on your memory for whatever reason this year.

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Was Liverpool 2008 a success? Or should we quote Dave Kirby's play, Council Depot Blues: "It's now official – the capital of culture has been a load of shite"?

According to the Liverpool Culture Company (creative director: Phil Redmond), the year of events has pumped £800m into the local economy and brought 3.5 million first-time visitors to the city. Audiences at the Everyman and Playhouse theatres were up 22% and half a million people turned out to see the giant spider.

Culture secretary Andy Burnham is happy. After 19 official visits in 10 months to the town where he was born, he said regeneration of confidence and pride mattered far more than the transformation of the city centre.

But in Liverpool, where no difference of perspective has ever been knowingly under-articulated, or indeed under-performed, the story is always more complicated. That Dave Kirby play, enjoyed by the Guardian's Alfred Hickling, was produced at the Royal Court theatre without subsidy from the capital of culture or anyone else. The same theatre revived the work of the city's most popular playwrights, Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, and its capacity is roughly the equivalent of the Everyman and Playhouse put together.

While Liverpool 2008 seemed anxious to celebrate its most famous offspring (Paul McCartney's Anfield concert was one of the biggest events), somehow negotiations faltered between the two star writers who actually live there and the official institutions. Russell and Bleasdale took their wares elsewhere. Kirby, an ex-council worker, joined them.

So did the capital of culture lineup bridge the gap between people's theatre and the cultural establishment? There has been snobbery in the English theatre at least since Hamlet used the word "groundlings" to refer to the audience that was beneath him; the word refers to the glassy-eyed fish staring up when you disturb the silt at the bottom of the river.

Why are "popular" writers almost completely overlooked in most of the historical overviews of British theatre since the war? You look in vain for even a mention of Willy Russell's Educating Rita or Blood Brothers, still running more than 20 years after it opened; both are surely as effective an expression of the destructive nature of a class-torn society as anything by Brecht or something seen by 60 people in a London garret.

Gemma Bodinetz, artistic director of the Everyman and Playhouse, is more excited by a much smaller statistic than the number of new visitors to the city. Her audiences have gone up by 46% over three years, and 15% of the total now comes from areas of Liverpool where marketing experts do not expect theatres to sell tickets at all: estates where rates of poverty, crime, drug dependency and ill-health are among the worst in Europe.

The theatres' outreach work takes some of the credit for this, but so, thinks Bodinetz, does having Matthew Kelly (in Endgame) and Pete Postlethwaite (in King Lear) on the Everyman stage, lured in part by capital of culture money and attention. Despite some iffy reviews, King Lear was sold out and, long as it was, unfailingly gripping. Audiences in Liverpool, less bothered by what is official and what isn't, have responded faster to the idea of a people's theatre than the cultural establishment.

The giant spider belonged to the people in another sense. They happened upon it rather than planning ahead and buying tickets. They were all, as Bodinetz puts it, turned into seven-year-olds by its wonder. And it was delivered in part by forklift truck and crane operators working with unaccustomed creativity and having, by all accounts, the time of their lives on what was a relatively last-minute project.

Will it feature in future histories of British theatre? On past form, probably not. What's our problem with the idea that art can be entertaining, and entertainment can have the soul-stirring quality of great art? There is no sign yet of a "legacy" of Liverpool 2008 in terms of extra cash or better buildings for culture. But wouldn't it be as good a legacy to fill in the snobbery gulf?

• Liverpool 2008: European capital of culture
• Theatre

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Hassan Mahamdallie: 'Multicultural' policies are preferable to the tyranny of the free market

So 2008 comes spluttering to an end in the traditional way: coughing up its memories and confessions in a column-filling flurry of 'Highlights of the year' articles. Critics and artists are dragged away from panto (or whatever it is that AA Gill does at this time of year) to carefully consider their favourite things from the last 12 months for us to disagree with.

This parade of lists and awards always leaves me a little dissatisfied. It's not that the small, elite group of high-profile shows and artists that end up on these lists aren't great. It's just that in my head, I don't remember a year by a few stand-out productions that tick all the boxes on some scientifically divined checklist of good.

The year for me is a collage of moments of wonder and beauty and strangeness and fear. It's a moment that knocks you off your feet in the midst of a bad production. It's the moment when something goes wrong and makes everything better. It's a tiny experiment you almost didn't bother going to. It's a feeling that pricks you like a jabbed finger in the ribs when you weren't really paying attention. An uneasy memory that stops you from sleeping weeks after you saw the show.

So alongside the other end-of-year roll calls, I would like to create a little repository of tiny memories; strange moments that will stay with you. Fleeting memories and feelings that you will cherish from the last year. No judgement. No best-of. Just those moments of wonder that make theatre the truly brilliant, unexpected, heart-racing experience that it sometimes is. Here are a few of mine:

Hearing Laurie Anderson punch out the line "there's trouble at the mine", full of anguish and desperation, to a sold-out and utterly transfixed audience at the Barbican during Homeland. And to feel it hit me a few seconds later smack in my gut, somewhere between an accusation and a call to arms.

Following Simon Kane, covered in rice pudding and holding a dead fish, from the delirious universe of his spellbinding show Jonah Non Grata at the Shunt vaults out into an almost empty London Bridge station, in the early hours of the morning. Dazed and gazing around at the couple groping wildly on one side, and the drunk banging on a vending machine on the other, I felt we were all hopelessly somewhere between this world and Simon's head.

And finally, looking around me at Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On to see people standing up from their seats in the dark depths of Sadler's Wells to dance along with the figures on stage, whilst others around them just sat and watched with tears in their eyes.

So those are few of mine. Now how about yours?

• Theatre

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London's theatres have already embraced an action plan, launched by the mayor of London in September, to reduce energy use in their buildings. According to the report, the capital's theatre industry creates 50,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year – the equivalent of emissions from 9,000 homes.

If all actions recommended in the plan were taken, the mayor's report concludes, the industry could reduce carbon emissions by almost 60 per cent by 2025. This would equate to converting over 5,000 London homes to zero-carbon.

The Arcola theatre in Dalston, east London, has led the way. It established Arcola Energy in 2007, with the aim of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral theatre. Earlier this year, the Arcola installed an environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity and clean water to run the theatre's cafe-bar and selected main house productions.

While the Arcola's 5kW fuel cell system takes pride of place in the theatre's foyer (and is accompanied by displays describing the benefits of this new technology), the real benefits are behind the scenes. The first show to use it had a peak power consumption of 4.5kW, up to 60% less than comparable lighting installations. For this year's annual Latitude music festival in Southwold, the Arcola provided fuel cell power and low energy lighting that cut power consumption there by over 70%. The festival organisers also offered solar showers and reusable cups.

The National Theatre, too, joined forces last year with Philips to replace their external lighting, delivering a 70% reduction in the energy needed to illuminate the building's flytowers. The move will ultimately save the theatre an estimated £100,000 a year. Environmentally-friendly bulbs have also been installed throughout the building. As the National's artistic director Nick Hytner has said, "It's important that we in the theatre get there first and get there quickly. If the NT, with its tremendous consumption of light, can show that by adopting new technology you can have results as dramatic as these are – then I think everybody is going to sit up and take notice."

Thinking green can actually produce a specifically green result: the Lyric Hammersmith is currently transforming its roof terrace into a community garden, scheduled to open in the Spring. Environmental charity Groundwork are implementing the scheme, which will see the garden – open to the general public and not just theatregoers – offering a new wildlife habitat, an artistic canopy and performance space. The best bit: it is, according to the press release, the first wave of "greener living spaces" to be funded by Marks & Spencer's 5p charge for food carrier bags, introduced to encourage customers to reduce the amount of plastic bags they use.

The Lyric has perhaps taken the green drive most literally. Its current show, Cinderella, actually has over 40 silver birch trees onstage. Needless to say, they have been sourced from a sustainable working plantation. According to a programme note interview with assistant production manager Jasmine Sandalli, "The trees grow in a woodland which is regenerated every 50 years or so."

• Theatre
• Energy
• Energy efficiency

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Jingle blogs! Jingle blogs! Jingle all the way! Yes, this week, Noises off comes to you swathed in cheap tinsel, wearing a Santa hat and an assortment of other Christmas cliches. Yet, sadly, the spirit of Christmas cheer does not seem to have permeated the blogosphere. In fact, many of this week's bloggers seem either to be ignoring it altogether or to be delivering a resounding "Humbug!" in the direction of anything that looks even vaguely festive.

Unsurprisingly, this attitude is best captured by the West End Whingers. They have adorned their site with a rather nifty animated snow effect and a fantastically traumatised looking snowman. But it is in their continuing campaign against unreserved seating that their Grinchiness really comes to the fore. They describe the scramble for seats during a recent trip to see Loot at the Tricycle theatre as "a shambles", before adding: "The master-stroke in the Tricycle's Krypton Factor game is that only one end of each row has access. Turn the whole thing on its side and put it vertically and it resembles a live version of Tetris."

Yet, as Mark Shenton has pointed out, their irritation is nothing compared to the response they appear to have provoked from the theatre itself: Elly Hopkins, the Tricycle's marketing director, replied to them, saying grumpily: "all your comments duly noted, ignored and binned". This is hardly the stuff of the season of goodwill. Perhaps Hopkins and the boy Whingers should share a glass of mulled wine to warm their spirits.

Charles Spencer is also grumbling in his new blog on the Telegraph's website. The target of his attack is the Comedy theatre in the West End. More specifically, he is annoyed about the price of a cup of coffee in the theatre bar – £2.50, apparently. I doubt that that is going to put much of a dent in the weekly paycheck that the Telegraph sends him but he is, at least, right to point out how depressingly expensive the West End can be. And, as Ian Shuttleworth asks in an article on why some theatres are failing to pass on the recent VAT cut to audiences: "I wonder how producers and theatre owners can expect government to pay any attention to their pleas for public money to pay for refurbishing their privately-owned premises when they in turn pay so little heed to what are, after all, actual items of fiscal legislation."

But if there is one true theatrical Scrooge this Christmas, then it has to be David Mamet. As the Some Came Running blog reports, the actor Jeremy Piven recently dropped out of a Broadway revival of Mamet's play Speed-the-Plow because he felt unwell due to "a high mercury count". Mamet, it seems, is highly sceptical of this excuse. When asked for his response, he said "I talked to Jeremy on the phone, and he told me that he discovered that he had a very high level of mercury. So my understanding is that he is leaving showbusiness to pursue a career as a thermometer."

On top of this, Mamet has also, apparently, been completely indifferent to the recent opening (and then, after poor reviews, early closing) of another of his plays on Broadway: American Buffalo. Why is he so unconcerned with the fate of a play that is often considered to be one of his finest? Well, as the Playgoer points out, the rumour is that all of the royalties from this show go to his ex-wife Lindsay Crouse, who got them as part of a divorce settlement in the early 90s. And so Mamet has nothing to gain financially from the production. While this attitude might sound breathtakingly cynical, it shouldn't, perhaps, be surprising. This year, Mamet has undergone a complete volte-face politically, and more recently has described himself as a "craven business type ... interested only in making a buck". Let's hope that, come Christmas Eve when Mamet is sitting in his garret and counting his pennies, the ghosts of theatre past, present and future decide to pay him a visit.

I shall be taking a break from the blogs over Christmas, but I will be back in the New Year to keep you updated with everyone's online theatrical musings. Until then, merry Christmas and God bless us, every one!

• Theatre
• West End

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Biggest surprise: That I liked Complicite's A Disappearing Number so much more second time round. Maybe being accompanied to the show by an accountant did the trick.

Limpest moment: The sex scenes in Northern Stage's The Bloody Chamber. Angela Carter would have roared with derisive, salty laughter.

Zero-star shows: Peter Pan El Musical and An Audience With the Mafia

Five-star shows: None. Is this a significant indicator of the state of British theatre, or just a blip?

Best special effect: The intelligent rain that spelled out Never Forget just before the interval of the Take That musical. I shall never forget it, but I have entirely wiped the rest of the show from memory.

Favourite animals: The rabbits running over the stage in The Sisters at the Gate, the bunnies and duck in Gifford Circus, and the horse in An Infinite Line in a basement in Brighton. How did they get it in there? I felt quite sorry for the goldfish eaten alive in the Jim Rose circus until I discovered it was a piece of carrot. Oh, the infinite magic of theatre!

Things I do not want to see on stage in 2009: Rain (see above); ukuleles (so last year); bubbles (unless it is in a show for the under fives and then it is perfectly acceptable, and not at all twee).

Favourite venue: Forest Fringe, the free venue at the Edinburgh fringe. Like an evening in your own poltergeist-infested front room. Cosy, but constantly surprising at the same time. Bring it on for 2009.

Audience participation moment 1: The blanket refusal of the audience at the appalling Peter Pan El Musical to stand and say they believe in fairies in order to save Tinkerbell. "Let the bitch die," muttered one punter.

Most heart-stopping moment: In Dreamthinkspeak's One Step Forward, One Step Back, emerging out of the dark into the great cavernous body of the cathedral to find Dante's Beatrice walking the nave. I rather regret not giving this five stars.

Audience participation moment 2: Singing about clouds in Nic Green's Cloudpiece.

Best festival 1: Burst at BAC. A real sense of a building tingling and whispering with possibilities.

Best festival 2: Latitude. Much better than Glastonbury for theatre and practically everything else too. A better class of mud all round.

Best transpositions: Hedda Gabler to 1950s housewife at Northern Stage and Othello to northern pub bouncer in Frantic Assembly revival.

Worst performance: The Mercy Man in An Audience With the Mafia. Voice like the speaking clock and arms like demented windmills.

Good trashy nights out: Eurobeat and La Clique

Least moving marital breakdown: Imogen Stubbs and Iain Glein in Scenes from a Marriage. Just send them to Relate for God's sake.

Best swinging on the chandeliers moment: Kneehigh's Brief Encounter.

Best at stopping the traffic: La Machine's giant spider crawling through the streets of Liverpool and making the entire city smile.

Most required qualities for a theatre critic during 2008: Optimism, an open mind and a stout pair of shoes.

• Theatre

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Inevitably, this blog is going to be short and sweet this week, but you may be surprised to hear that there are a couple of new openings. The Lost and Found Orchestra, which opens at the South Bank on Monday, comes from the same stable as Stomp! and I quite enjoyed an early incarnation which I caught at the Brighton festival back in May 2006. If it's developed a more theatrical bent, it could be a real winner by now.

I never tire of Sondheim's Into the Woods, and I'm looking forward to the Upstairs at the Gatehouse revival that opens on Tuesday. It plugs the gap that the old Phil Willmott musicals at BAC used to fill so splendidly and for which I feel hugely nostalgic. There's no real child-friendly offering at BAC this year, but I'm glad to say that Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea has been extended until 10 January. Nasty, but very, very nice.

If you are reading this early, you've got until Sunday to discover where the secret Punchdrunk show is that I tipped you off about last week. Plus I've heard that some of the best-reviewed shows are not packed out this Christmas, so don't be put off trying for Cinderella at the Lyric Hammersmith, Mother Goose at the Hackney Empire or August: Osage County at the National.

No need to queue for day seats for War Horse any more, as it is galloping into the West End after it finishes its sold-out run at the National on 20 March.

Tom Morris, who has done much to help Nick Hytner kick the National into the 21st century, is one of the co-directors on War Horse, and he is also co-directing (with Felix Barrett of Punchdrunk) a revival of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, starring Toby Jones and Dan Stevens, which starts previewing in the Olivier in early January. The combination of Stoppard and Barrett is one that I can't quite get my head around, but I'm prepared to be surprised.

I'm so knackered that I'm looking forward to a few days off, although I will be going down to Bristol just after Christmas to see Travelling Light's Home, because it marks the re-opening (temporarily at least) of Bristol Old Vic. I'm also going to pop into the Egg in Bath to see The Nutcracker, not the ballet but a staged version of EA Hoffman's original story.

If you have under-fives in the family, I'd urge you to go and see How Long is a Piece of String?, the latest from Oily Cart at the Unicorn. It takes me back to my own childhood of playing at boats with the upside-down kitchen table. It is touring to Mold, Stirling, Chichester, Malvern and Warwick in the New Year. Along with Fevered Sleep's Brilliant, it's one of the best things I've seen this year.

Over the coming days, I'll be returning to the question of the shows I've liked most over the year – not least because my geographical, spatial and emotional interests are sometimes quite different from those of my colleagues. Nevertheless, I have been pleased to see that Dreamthinkspeak's mesmerising One Step Forward, One Step Back has been getting credit where credit is due in some surprising and some not so surprising places. As so few of the shows I really love ever make it to the podium at awards ceremonies, the least I can do while I've got the platform is make sure they get the nod here.

• Theatre

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