IN LONDON, there’s been a lot of loss in theatrical themes this year, and a lot of theft.

In the stupendous Exodus at the Finborough from writer and director Rachael Boulton and her trailblazing company Motherlode, there was a loss of hope, future and self-esteem while the theft of language and a community’s sense of its own history was ever-present in Brian Friel’s Translations at the National Theatre.

In it, Ciaran Hinds dominated the stage as the charismatic Latinate scholar Hugh, claiming that the lyrical and sometimes mendacious Irish language was “our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes,” while in Ella Hickson’s The Writer at the Almeida there is loss of a woman’s identity and purpose with Romola Garai as the eponymous playwright coming across as uncertain, neurotic and passive.