Theatre Top 3 last year

That reminds me, I wanted to do a top three end-of-the-year-style countdown of the best things I saw in 2011, but here it is two months late.

3. One Man, Two Guvnors

I feel quite privileged to have seen this for £5 at the National as I walk past queues of people in sleeping bags outside it now every morning on my way to work. By far the most I have ever laughed in a theatre. The slapstick is brilliantly choreographed and the way the show interacts with the audience is very clever, meaning everyone who sees it really feels they have been a part of something special.

2. The Pitmen Painters

Another National production, based on the true story of a group of Northumberland miners who took art lessons in their spare time. The paintings they produced, and the questions about art the play raises, are both incredibly thought-provoking. It is powerfully acted, engages with class, politics and art, and the script is funny and touching, while being playful with juxtaposing the geordie dialect of the miners against the RP tutor. It is still on at the Duchess theatre, somehow without queues out the door.

1. Jerusalem

Quite simply the best play I have ever seen. Incredibly acted, at times hilarious (the Professor/Ginger), at others brutal. Mark Rylance was amazing, and the supporting cast not far behind. No wonder it was as successful as it was. I was front row, thanks to an amazing Christmas present from my girlfriend, and that was two months ago. I still feel like I'm in Rooster's Wood now.

Theatre for the upper-classes?

I went to see the Noel Coward play Hay Fever at the Noel Coward this week, and can't say I particularly enjoyed it. It got a couple of laughs out of me, and has a good comic scene at the end where the four guests to the family's home try to escape without being noticed a day before they are due to leave, but overall I felt it relied too much on the public's inkling to laugh at a hyperbolic shambolic upper-middle-class.

It kind of grated on me, and after Terence Rattigan's centenary productions across the West End last year, it got me thinking why it is these plays are seen as candidates for reproduction in the current social climate, which seems to me quite anti-upper-class. (Maybe I just speak to the right people.) Is it because successful playwrights of the first half of the 20th century tended to focus on these characters rather than those occupying different places in society? Write what you know after all. By all accounts, Coward had a modest upbringing, but from an outsider's perspective, and from watching plays like Hay Fever, it seems writing for the stage used to be a hobby of the privileged, or it was demanded by audiences that it appeared that way.

It still begs the question of why they are being revived and revisited in theatres across the country in 2012. Is theatre-going still an upper-class pursuit? I'd like to think not. Then again, I got a free ticket.