THE year began well. There have been a number of Hamlets this year, with two particularly interesting ones from the RSC. Productions of Shakespeare‘s iconic play often depend upon its eponymous hero.

Rupert Goold’s idea to set the tragedy aboard an ocean cruise liner  with the clear dating 1912 left few in doubt that this related to the Titanic. This was no directorial gimmick but a remarkable way of insetting the dramatic tragedy within the reality of a real historic disaster. This brilliant device interfered in no way with Shakespeare’s play but Luke Thallon’s Hamlet is no longer the “owner” of this play but one member of a society that, like our own, blindly seeks to court its own curtain call.

The imported Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham at Stratford’s Swan Theatre presented an altogether more cheerful version of the play. When, at the all-black barbecue party celebrating the marriage of Juicy’s mother to his uncle, his father’s ghost inconveniently turns up to tell him that his uncle had murdered him and demands that he exact revenge, we know where we are. But Juicy, a young, gay student, really doesn’t want to get involved, preferring to pursue a career in human resources rather than in the family’s pork butchery.

Brilliantly performed and hugely inventive, James Ijames’s play is more than a joyous comedy. It explores a number of contemporary themes in working-class black society in the US, particularly the struggle of youth, to escape claustrophobic conventions of their elders.

Samuel Beckett’s End Game at Bath’s Ustinov Studio theatre presented a drastic change of tone. Perhaps today, the only way to treat Beckett’s characteristic themes of isolation and despair is to seek out the “macabre comedy.” The blind, wheelchair imprisoned Ham and his resentful servant Clov are marooned in a room with windows that reveal an apparently post-apocalyptic world outside. Two dustbins contain Ham’s parents, Nag and Nell, whose upper bodies emerge briefly to exchange memories. Throughout, the dialogue-exchanges sound like a sour comedy routine.

With the aid of the superb acting, Lindsey Posner’s production underlines Nell’s observation on the absurdity of existence, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

Bad Lads, Graeae Company’s touring production of the Thatcherite “short, sharp shock” treatment of the boys held at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre in Co Durham in the 1960s was my most memorable theatre experience of this year, largely because it used the artifice of theatre to engage with brutal reality. Largely ignored for 20 years, it is only this year that the final official inquiry was launched into the physical brutality and sexual exploitation of 1,800 inmates. This crime, ignored by a knowing officialdom, has been fully uncovered.

A three-man cast strip the action of any theatricality that would allow you to forget the message when leaving the theatre. An older man played someone who had gone through the experience; a younger man played someone in the midst of it; and a third, who conveyed the violation involved. Based on the testimony of now middle-aged men, an increasing number of whom had had lives scarred by their state-sponsored suffering, this simple but stunning production had so much more than a documentary power.

And last, Welsh National Opera’s revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide was an exhilarating ride through Voltaire’s 18th century satire of a philosophical world view that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” the supposed guarantee against despair. Visually, musically and technically the audience were hurtled through our unfortunate hero’s world-wide journey, surviving and overcoming various crises, and yet clinging on to a faith that every experience refutes.

After all, we all need a dose of fantasy to survive.