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Three plays made a special connection with me this year: The Wild Duck at the Almeida, Girls & Boys at the Royal Court, and the Young Vic’s West End production of The Inheritance (I missed the original run).

Robert Icke’s radical adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck proved once again his alchemic ability to conjure drama out of thin air. What begins as an arm’s-length study of the source text becomes a powerfully engrossing, and significantly unresolved, battle between two opposing philosophies: truth at all costs and the ‘life lie’.

Equally breathtaking was Denis Kelly’s Girls & Boys. Driven by Carey Mulligan’s charmingly brutal, deeply multifaceted performance, this play about the fallout of thwarted masculinity draws you in to rip you apart. You quickly sense the dark place it’s taking you to but you can’t turn away.

From a cast of one to a consummate ensemble, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance is an expansive, touching study of a generation of gay New Yorkers living in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis. The play glides effortlessly from the personal to the political throughout its two impressively self-contained parts.

Inspired by EM Forster’s Howard’s End, The Inheritance curiously shares with Icke’s The Wild Duck a manner of making up the show from scratch and subjecting it to continued scrutiny, along with a critical attitude towards its originator. Just as Ibsen’s motives in creating The Wild Duck are called into question, so Forster is challenged for suppressing his own sexuality. In both cases the metatextual moves are elegant rather than showy, and deepen our understanding.

I must also mention Arinzé Kene’s Misty and debbie tucker green’s ear for eye, two more plays to round out my top five of the year.

Kene’s lyrical triumph is a provoking exploration of what it means to be ‘a black play’ that never forgets to entertain, as well as enlighten, its audience. Meanwhile the hotly anticipated ear for eye delivered a poetic, scathing account of the many layers of prejudice suffered by black Britons and Americans.

Speaking of which, my final highlight of the year was Fabia Turner’s smart and insightful review of this important play. Read Fabia Turner’s review of ear for eye here.

My standout of the year was Chimerica at the Harold Pinter Theatre, transferred from the Almeida Theatre.

Lucy Kirkwood’s fast-paced thriller, produced by Headlong, hung a mystery around the famous image of the man standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square while skilfully showing us the shifting power balance between China and the US in the 20-plus years since the massacre.

A play with heavy themes that never seemed heavy, Chimerica was an object lesson in snaring the audience’s attention with the plot so the play can perform its deeper work almost unnoticed. With really sharp dialogue that’s always going somewhere, Kirkwood struck the perfect balance between entertainment and enlightenment.

Another Headlong production, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of 1984, toured during 2013 and will begin a run at the Almeida next year. The two author-directors have created a new way to access this well-worn text by placing the novel itself as an historical object at the heart of the play, picking up on hints in Orwell’s appendix.

Some ingenious use of multimedia techniques successfully makes us question the nature of reality, as the stage space is first subtly and then radically transformed. Even though we may be familiar with the story, the shock of the torture scenes is immediate and visceral, and the disturbing power of Winston’s demise becomes more pertinent than ever.

Meanwhile, Theatre 503 upheld its reputation for developing new writers with two first-time plays, Land of our Fathers by Chris Urch and Mucky Kid by Sam Potter.

The first of these told the story of a group of Welsh miners stranded underground, forced to confront the things which drive them apart while seeking togetherness through choral singing. Brothers by name or by deed, they can neither escape nor accept their situation, which leads to an emotionally overwhelming climax.

Where Land of our Fathers is an inexorable juggernaut, Mucky Kid is more devious and hard to pin down, showing us various, often contradictory scenes in the last 24 hours of a young woman escaped from prison. The structural invention is no mere trickery though, as it helps us to understand a personality constantly on the run from the painful truth of a violent crime.

Buried pasts, hidden identities, confined spaces and confined choices. All the ingredients of great drama were present in abundance in these plays. I’ll hope for more of the same in 2014.