The Best And Worst Of 2017

After watching new productions at a rate of about four a week, our theatre critic presents the brilliantly good, the excruciatingly bad and the movingly sad of this year

- Michael Billington

HOLLYWOOD has its Oscars and Broadway its Tonys. Here, based on 200 nights spent in theatres in 2017, are the Billies: my idiosyncratic selection of the best and worst of the tumultuous past 12 months.

Best new play

It’s been a big year for live animals on stage, with goats and dogs making stellar appearances. It’s not just because Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman includes real rabbits and a goose in the cast that it gets my vote, it’s because the play encompasses so much: a Northern Irish political thriller, a study of unspoken love and a Thomas Hardy-like evocation of timeless rural rituals.

In an outstanding year for new plays— Albion, Ink, Girl from the North Country and Consent—Mr Butterworth’s play Theatre Michael Billington takes the prize (as it did at this month’s London Evening Standard Theatre Awards).

Worst new play

It pains me to say this, as I’m a long-standing admirer of his work, but Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s The Divide was the year’s most crushing disappointment. This futuristic drama, set in a world of enforced sexual segregation in which the species is continued by artificial insemination, occupied six energy-draining hours of one’s time at the Edinburgh Festival and is destined to have a brief afterlife at the Old Vic. Sir Alan’s genius is for exposing the absurdities of the here and now rather than for taking the road to dystopia.

Most striking newcomer

If one good thing came out of The Divide, it was the emergence of Erin Doherty. It fell to her to convey the sweetness and sadness of a woman who saw herself as a reborn Jane Eyre. Miss Doherty went on to enhance her reputation as the eponymous heroine of My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Young Vic, in which she played a young American activist crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.