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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.

Towards the end of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation (Royal Court/Haggerston, running till 3 August), the drama teacher/life coach Marty asks the four members of her class to write a secret they have never told anyone on a slip of paper. She’ll do the same. They will each then take a random slip from the pile and read it to the group.

It’s a wonderfully economic example of the need to situate drama in the live moment onstage, rather than simply in the stories of the various characters. From the moment the task is set the atmosphere crackles with a sense of possibility, for the characters and the audience alike.

The task draws the audience into the situation. We might ask ourselves: how would I respond? What would my special secret be? Would I dare to write something meaningful or would I play it safe, coming up with some tame, socially acceptable secret?

Engaged in this game the paper slips themselves become objects charged with meaning, charged with the power to transform the lives onstage. They are no longer just scraps of paper torn from a random sheet. They matter to us now.

And then as the secrets are revealed in turn we learn the limits of anonymity in a group this size. We feel we can trace each secret to its owner with patient deduction. Surely that’s a male secret, that’s a female one? If that’s Theresa’s secret then it can’t be Lauren’s, and so on.

As the group read the secrets aloud we read their faces for clues. We see them reacting and dissembling, trying to work it all out for themselves as the possibilities unfold. We are all engaged in the same action, audience and characters combined in the dramatic moment.

It’s a remarkable scene from a delicately powerful play, with generous performances and the best use of a site-specific location I’ve seen. Catch it if you can by Saturday.