Director Rupert Goold and co have a field day with Lulu Raczka’s elusive new Jacobean folk horror; star-crossed Cardiff teenagers snare hearts and minds; and Sheridan Smith makes Willy Russell’s midlife monologue her own

Gary Owen’s magnificent one-woman monologue brings Greek tragedy to Cardiff and reveals the terrible emotional costs of our societal shortfalls

Panto tropes are happily pooh-poohed with a gender-swapped Scrooge and properly terrifying puppetry in Joe Murphy’s triumphant Dickens redo

A hip-hop history lesson, a dizzy Dahl musical and a continent-hopping barbershop … we pick the finest new works of theatre since 2000

Sarah Frankcom made Thorton Wilder’s small-town hymn Our Town sing in Manchester, a new British musical was full of feeling and Andrew Scott’s mercurial prince let us see Hamlet anew

On the centenary of the Russian revolution, a glut of revivals show Chekhov’s characters struggling to adjust to the social earthquakes that engulf them

The red-hot team of playwright Gary Owen and director Rachel O’Riordan relocate the Russian classic to 1980s Wales

A computer game that rewards players for creative killing is at the centre of Gary Owen’s raw and heartbreaking three-hander

Phyllida Lloyd’s storming all-female Shakespeare trilogy is saluted by Lyn Gardner who, in no set order, chooses other essential productions of the year