From a raft of new bijou venues to another blizzard of striking productions and rising talents, Steve Wright found plenty to enjoy in Theatreland 2011.

Theatre, like other art forms, is struggling under an austere financial climate, but wandering around the local theatre landscape over the last 12 months, you’d have been hard pushed to see its effects. Theatre was as adventurous and risk-taking as ever; audiences numbers seemed largely buoyant; and we were even treated to the encouraging spectacle of not one, but three new theatre spaces for Bristol. First came the splendid Wardrobe Theatre (“not as small as an actual wardrobe, more the size of an open-plan kitchen”, as its creators clarify), a beautiful space in a former junk room above Kingsdown’s White Bear pub. The team there – many of them Bristol Old Vic Young Company alumni – have hit upon an eclectic and brilliant mix of theatre, comedy, poetry and the theatre’s own fortnightly soap opera. Russell Howard even did two secret nights there this summer. From décor to programming, publicity to artist support, the Wardrobe team seem to do have done everything right and we wish them very well for the future. Another arrival was The Little Black Box, an even more bijou theatre space in a former grocer’s shop on Chandos Road. And, pitching up at the tail end of the year – so expect to hear more from them next year – is the Bierkeller Theatre, a new 300-seat theatre in the building that houses the eponymous rockers’ venue.

Among the existing theatres, Theatre West gave us another fine autumn season of new writing at the Alma Tavern, based this year on the splendid premise of giving a load of writers some evocative old photos and seeing what they came up with. Highlights included Penny Gunter’s ‘Dorian’s Second Life’, a highly physical, one-man show about a man whose obsession with a certain high-adrenaline sport has had dramatic effects upon his family life. Another high point was ‘I Remember Green’ by Southwest Scriptwriters’ Heather Lister (pictured) above, which explored the relationship between parents and their son who was blinded as a result of a fall, for which the father feels responsible. Cue some lyrical, poetic writing, and much left unsaid about what the torment has done to the parents’ relationship.

Predictably, another Alma highlight was May’s Directors’ Cuts season, for which four graduating directors at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School directed classmates in a series of handpicked modern dramas. All four plays were brilliantly done, but pick of the bunch was Ed Stamboulian’s version of ‘The Aliens’ (pictured above), Annie Baker’s play about a trio of New England slackers, dealing with male friendship, coming-of-age, creative expression and frustrated genius. Sensitively directed, with a laidback, gently bonhomous tone that effortlessly fanned out into a kaleidoscope of male emotions, and containing three truly exceptional performances from BOVTS graduands Bart Edwards, Luke Newberry and (especially) a wonderful Jack Holden, hiding inner sadness and anger behind a droll slacker facade.

A few local companies consolidated themselves as purveyors of well-crafted but adventurous theatre this year – often in collaboration with each other. Take ‘Outside’ at Bristol’s Brewery theatre, for example, a collaborative effort between Bristol outfits Darkstuff and Roughhouse, which transplanted – with some success – Albert Camus’s existentialist sacred text ‘The Outsider’ to post-9/11 Britain. Soon after, Roughhouse conquered the wild slopes of Arnos Vale Cemetery to give us a brace of alfresco stripped-down, modern-dress Shakespeares. Our reviewer described their ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ as “undoubtedly the best performance of a Shakespeare comedy Venue's ever seen in a cemetery.” High praise indeed.

Bath's top non-pro troupe, the consistently adventurous Next Stage, had another year marked by quality and boldness - standout productions included Muriel Spark's 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', Joe Orton's merry farce 'What the Butler Saw' and Tom Stoppard's inimitable riddle of life, art and the creative muse, 'The Real Thing'. Constantly seeking out challenging theatrical fare for both audiences and themselves - their next production, Jez Butterworth's rural-idyll-gone-wrong 'Jerusalem', is a case in point - Next Stage are an example to am-drammers everywhere.

Back at The Brewery, other highlights of an excellent second-year at the Tobacco Factory’s increasingly confident studio theatre included another run for ‘Leaves of Glass’, Philip Ridley’s painfully emotional family drama as performed superbly by local RoomOne Productions; more brilliant comic theatre from Bristol’s Publick Transport with ‘Discombobulated’ and ‘Very Hard Times’; and another outing from the excellent Idiot Child Theatre with ‘You’re Not Doing It Right’, a tender and comic paean to awkwardness.

The Tobacco Factory’s main house, for its part, was as replete with theatrical gems as ever – not least ‘Jigsy’, Tony Staveacre’s portrait of a waning Scouse comic, played with stunning clarity by – yes – Les Dennis. ‘Dylan Thomas: Return Journey’ was a beautiful enactment of the man, the verse, the genius and the drink, and the brilliant Filter Theatre returned with another joyously exuberant Shakespeare adaptation – this time of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Over at the Rondo in Bath, sketch troupe New Old Friends continued to make strides, and former Rondo artistic director Andy Burden directed a taut and effortlessly dramatic ‘Henry V’. Another Rondo treat was ‘The Decent Rogues’, a brand new musical staged by local troupe Music is Life, and telling the tale of two well-respected members of Edwardian village life – who also happened to be gentlemen crooks. And Bristol’s ace comic troupe Gonzo Moose returned with another cock-eyed literary hommage, ‘Grimm and Grimmer’, which blurred fiction and reality as brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and their beloved sister Lotte, travelling deepest Bavaria in search of fairy tales, found themselves trapped in a twisted fantasy world of their own making.

Bristol Festival of Puppetry made a triumphant debut in 2009, and returned to the Tob Fac this year with more top-notch dispatches from the keen edges of modern puppetry. Where the first BFoP showcased to the world the incredible talents within Bristol puppetry scene – yer Green Gingers, Pickled Images, Full Beams et al – the second instalment reached outwards and drew some of the world’s finest marionettists to Bristol, among them Norway’s Nordland Visual Theatre, New York’s Wakka Wakka and Australia’s brilliant Neville Tranter. And, from some strained birthday celebrations in Adolf Hitler’s Berlin bunker to a post-Armageddon dystopia in which scientists created baby universes in the hope of birthing a planet to support our ravaged populace, BFoP 2011’s menu was a brilliant testament to the rich array of stories, scenes and emotions that modern adult puppetry can encapsulate.

As it turns out, 2011 was the last year to feature a season of plays curated by the great Sir Peter Hall at Theatre Royal Bath. And Hall bowed out in some style, himself directing ‘Henry IV Parts 1 & 2’. Across its two parts, ‘Henry IV’ encompasses the entire panorama of 14th/15th-century English life, from the sleazy taverns of Eastcheap to the stately splendour of the royal court. Elsewhere in the season, Christopher Luscombe directed The Madness of George III and Stephen Unwin took the reins for a wonderful version of This Happy Breed, Noel Coward’s rarely-staged drama which follows the ups and downs of one ordinary South London family between the two World Wars. In similarly textured, character-rich vein, TRB later welcomed Mike Leigh’s new stage play ’Grief’, a brilliant, meticulously characterised and finally harrowing tale of an introverted family quietly imploding amid the stuffiness and loss of post-war Britain. Earlier in the year, meanwhile, Derek Jacobi gave us a frazzled, expressive and emotional ‘King Lear’ at TRB, in Michael Grandage’s sparse, white-box production.

It was all change across at the Ustinov, with the arrival of artistic director Laurence Boswell, trailing legions of Hollywood stars behind him and ushering in a new reign of repertory theatre. His first European classics season, including new versions of plays by Goethe, Calderon de la Barca and Marivaux, has looked promising enough: beautifully acted, subtly directed and technically on the money, although you wonder – in the cases, in particular, of Marivaux’s The Surprise of Love and Goethe’s Iphigenia – whether his choices are of enduring relevance to modern audiences. More will be revealed next year.

Before Boswell’s arrival, the Ustinov played out the last of departing AD Andrew Smaje’s programming – and some gems there were too, including a double bill of rarely seen Pinter classics, Landscape and Monologue, both inspired by memory and both exceptional pieces of emotional, expressive and minimalist chamber theatre. We also liked The Summer House, an anarchic comedy by writer/performers Will Adamsdale, Neil Haigh and Matthew Steer, which also graced Mayfest.

While building crews dug deep inside the grand old building for its major regeneration, Bristol Old Vic’s big theatrical event of the year was their alfresco Treasure Island (pictured), fantastically staged aboard a hulking, battle-scarred pirate ship run aground in King Street. Written by Mike Akers, directed by Sally Cookson and devised with the cast as they went along, the play was, we proclaimed, a triumph – not least for Tristan Sturrock’s Long John Silver: “At the heart of this classic tale of ambiguous morality, split loyalties and treasure-lust is the Machiavellian opportunist Silver, a veritable tour de force by Sturrock. He plays the piratical unidexter fast and loose, fashioning him into a seductive quicksilver snake of twists and turns, now with a heart of gold, now of stone.”

Better still, though, was Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, in the Studio back in the spring. Simon Godwin’s staging of Friel’s gripping memory play was a minimalist triumph, a startling example of what a beautiful script, an unblinkingly committed cast (Finbar Lynch, Kathy Kiera Clarke and Richard Bremmer), some sensitive direction and a pitch-perfect set can achieve.

Arguably, Mayfest 2012 didn’t hit the extraordinary heights of its predecessor (we’re still talking about Ontroerend Goed’s extraordinary ‘Internal’ 18 months on), but nonetheless there were some very beguiling and arresting incursions into adventurous new performance. High praise, in particular, to Foster & Déchery, whose Epic unfurled the key events of the 20th century via video, storytelling, live music, dance, physical theatre and more. We also liked Stand + Stare’s The Guild of Cheesemakers, whose audiences found themselves guests at a top-notch foodie gathering, albeit shot through with moments of pleasing theatrical oddity. Theatrical discoveries of the year Little Bulb Theatre also beguiled us, while international troupe New International Encounter hit the spot again with their maritime epic Tales From A Sea Journey.

Early in the year, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory were on song as ever. Andrew Hilton’s ‘Comedy of Errors’ was alive to that play’s madcap comedy and daft symmetries, but also to the notes of loss and loneliness permeating the play; and ‘Richard II’ unearthed, in the title role, a huge new talent in John Heffernan.

Bring on another year…

Copyright Steve Wright 2011; pics copyright: 'I remember green', Farrows Creative; 'The Aliens', Mike Kleinsteuber; 'Treasure Island', Mark Douet, 2011