THINKING back, the memorable shows from this year’s fare are mostly revivals.

Outstanding was the touring production of The Girl from the North. Conor McPherson’s collaboration with Bob Dylan has led to what can only be described as a new genre of musical.
 
Set in the US Steinbeckian Depression years, the series of interlocking situations of a lost generation are given telling potency through Dylan’s songs, superbly performed at key moments by members of a 19-strong cast. The music and lyrics are more than complements to the narrative. They provide a sub-text commentary to lives squeezed almost dry of love by their economic and social austerity.

The Doctor, Robert Icke’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1922 Professor Bernhardi, re-emerged after the lockdown in Bath, before transferring to the West End at the Duke of York Theatre. The play goes to the heart of many of the key problems facing our contemporary society.
 
Ruth Wolff, a Jewish specialist doctor in charge of a hospital department, refuses the request of a Catholic priest to render the last rites to a 14-year-old dying boy leading to a national uproar.

The play focuses on questions not only of medical ethics but anti-semitism, identity and social versus individual rights. With a truly brilliant performance by Juliet Stevenson as Ruth, the play leaves the audience with critical questions – the marker for a five-star production.

The remarkable Frantic Assembly’s touring revival of their take on Othello was memorable for a number of reasons. Scott Graham, the company’s director, knows their honed distinctive style based essentially on dynamic physical movement can communicate in a way that words cannot.

This means here that while Shakespeare’s tragedy loses some of its poetry, it gains in conveying the central themes of the tragedy, violence and sex.
 
The setting is a gangland pub with much of the action centred around and upon a pool table. Amazingly love-making and murder between Michael Akinsulire’s Othello and Channel Waddock’s Desdemona both take on a tenderness which productions more pleasing for purists lack.
 
The main impact, however, must be to sit among a large youth audience, gripped throughout by Shakespeare – a response that the RSC rarely experience these days.
 
The most impressive new production was an Australian import to the Edinburgh Festival main programme at the Lyceum. Counting and Cracking from Sydney’s Belvoir St, a company committed to indigenous stories, here gives a voice to Sri Lanka’s Tamil people.
   
S Shakthiharan, as writer and associate director, draws on his own experience and Tamil heritage, and his need to share the painful modern history of his homeland.

With a large cast, mostly of Sri Lankan origin, this is an epic, threading a historical path through the lives of individuals, families and nations and the importance to all these, of identity. It is also essentially a love story beset by politics.  

No-one in the audience could respond with indifference to the plight of this beautiful, sad island country – already gone from our TV screens after brief current interest.

Finally, a strangely haunting novel. I read rather off-putting Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by a Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, whom I had never heard of, because I was excited that one of the most creative companies in the world, Simon McBurney’s Theatre de Complicite, is to perform a dramatised version of the novel at Bristol Old Vic in January, (they will be at the London Barbican from March 15 to April 1 2023).

What is it about? A difficult question! It is certainly a multi-murder-mystery-thriller but oh, so much more. To quote the novel blurb, “madness, injustice against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination.”

I am reading it pleasurably for a second time and can well understand what drew the innovatory appetite of Complicite.