The 14 best theatre shows in London in 2014

Yes, yes: of course it was a stupendous flop, and certainly ‘Made in Dagenham’ was technically the ‘better’ musical this year. Still, looking back there was something heroic about the way Harry Hill’s folly went down, in a bafflingly expensive hail of expensive throwaway gags and out there humour that had almost nothing to do with the show’s nominal subject, ‘The X Factor’. If nothing else, it’ll probably be remembered as the nail in the coffin of the 2,000-seater Brit megamuiscal.

With a plum role in ‘Spectre’ lined up, one wonders if Andrew Scott’s incipient superstardom is going to prevent him from starring in weird Simon Stephens plays for the Royal Court. If so, his portrait of a hollowed out rock star was a fine way to go out.

Earlier in the year at Soho Theatre, Paddy Campbell’s blackly brilliant and tremendously perceptive play set in a wet house – ie a homeless hostel in which booze is allowed – announced a tremendous new talent.

The tastiest treat on the fringe this year, Tooting Arts Club’s revival of Sondheim’s ‘Todd’ was a macabre marvel staged, gloriously in an actual Edwardian pie shop.

Definitely the most divisive bit of programming in Rupert Goold’s ongoing Almeida golden age, Anne Washburn’s play was a singular, maddeningly, dizzyingly imaginative work about folk myth and the meaning of stories, in which vague memories of an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ become the creation myth of a new America.

James Graham and Josie Rourke’s amusing and alarming entertainment about privacy – or lack thereof – in the digital age was arch, informative, deliberately rough around the edges and probably the funnest show the Donmar has ever staged.

Due to return next year, Christopher Bret Bailey’s show at Ovalhouse/Battersea Arts Centre was a remarkable piece of work, a bracingly old-fashioned beat poetry rant that dramatically and unexpectedly hopped genres to turn into something else entirely, a sublime musical plunge into the abyss.

Chris Thorpe’s ferocious one-man show about his attempts to understand the worldview of a white supremacist was illuminating, visceral and frightening, a big highlight of the Edinburgh Fringe that transferred down to the Battersea Arts Centre.

We’re not totally sure what’s going on with the National Theatre’s Shed/temporary theatre venue – it’s been dark since summer – but a year ago it was the hippest venue in town, as exemplified by Nick Payne and Carrie Cracknell’s superb piece of feminist provocation, ‘Blurred Lines’.

Having just lost all its Arts Council funding, Richmond’s supposedly fogey-ish Orange Tree Theatre unexpectedly unleashed the hipster hit of the year. Alistair McDowall’s ‘Pomona’ is a staggeringly original thriller that welds urban legend to societal fears to HP Lovecroft’s Cthulu Mythos. Funny, scary and one-of-a-kind – hopefully we haven’t seen the last of it.