Theatre: Clare Brennan’s five best shows of 2023

‘Extraordinary’: Liam Heslin and Sophie Lenglinger in The Plough and the Stars in Galway. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

1. DruidO’Casey
Galway; July
The experience of seeing Seán O’Casey’s three great Dublin-based plays, run back-to-back in one sitting (with intervals!), was revelatory. Under Garry Hynes’s direction, O’Casey’s flawed, human, foible-full characters achieve a mythic quality (extraordinary acting from the ensemble). The action, set in some of Dublin’s poorest districts before, after and during the Easter Rising of 1916, speaks of universal sufferings in time of strife.

2. Oliver!
Leeds Playhouse; December (runs until 27 January)

‘Hunger and poverty snap at characters’ heels’: Theo Wake in Oliver! Photograph: Alastair Muir

James Brining’s buoyant production brings out the tensions that underpin Lionel Bart’s hit 1960s musical, with its powerful sense of the brightness of life contrasted with the crushing realities that canker expectations. Hunger and poverty snap at characters’ heels, even as they joyously dance and sing. Shadow-suffused staging reflects moral uncertainties: where is love when people are struggling just to survive?

3. Beyond Belief: The Life and Mission of John and Pat Hume
Guildhall, Derry; April

‘A universal message’: Beyond Belief. Photograph: The Playhouse, Derry-Londonderry

This musical play (written by Damian Gorman and composed by Brian O’Doherty) commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. The action centres on the lives of joint Nobel peace prize winner John Hume and his wife, Pat. Kieran Griffiths’s production emphasises their shared belief that dialogue offers the best “chance for peace” – a universal message, powerfully communicated by the professional/community cast.

4. The Card
New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme; June
Community is core to Deborah McAndrew’s witty period adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s 1911 novel, following the social progress of a “card”, who is also a bit of a bounder. Under Conrad Nelson’s deft direction, a mixed company of professionals, amateurs and local brass band combines lively physicality with skilful manipulation of objects to whisk the audience through the multiple settings of this picaresque story.

5. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Ustinov Studio, Bath; January

Elizabeth McGovern and Dougray Scott delivered ‘vicious patter’ in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photograph: Johan Persson

Director Lindsay Posner and his cast perfectly play the rhythms of Edward Albee’s lacerating study of marriage. Dougray Scott’s George and Elizabeth McGovern’s Martha deliver a grotesque form of double act, with vicious patter finessed over 23 years of wedded blistering. In Posner’s production, this very particular naturalist, domestic situation opens into a wider consideration of painful co-dependencies of love and grief.