The year kicked off in fine fashion for theatreland, with box-office receipts revealing that 2010 had been a bumper 12 months for the West End and tills ringing to the tune of a record £512m. That record box office came despite heavy snowfall over the Christmas period, a global recession, a football World Cup and an erupting Icelandic volcano, whose ash cloud grounded flights across Europe. Time will tell whether 2011 can repeat its predecessor's success Photograph: Rex Butcher/Getty Images
One of the biggest, bounciest, best-endowed openings of the year came at the Royal Opera House, where Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole laid bare (ahem) the story of the Playboy bunny who married an octogenarian oil billionaire before dying in 2007 aged only 39. The opera was a genuine departure for Covent Garden and – despite mixed reviews – proved an exciting, canny piece of programming Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Everyone knew the cuts were coming, but after the arts sector had worked itself up into a lather of panic, campaigning and counter-campaigning, the most surprising element of the Arts Council’s funding decisions was just how unradical a shakeup it turned out to be. Certainly, there were some painful decisions – the complete cuts to the Exeter Northcott, Derby theatre and the Riverside Studios being notable examples, and the loss of companies such as the Featherstonehaughs (pictured) – but it certainly wasn’t the Tarantinoesque bloodbath many were predicting Photograph: Felix Clay
Following the opening of its revamped theatre, the RSC had another reason to celebrate: the company turned 50. As well as some special commemorative stamps, the season offered Michael Boyd’s Macbeth, Rupert Goold’s Las Vegas-set The Merchant of Venice, a superb revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming and a controversial new version of Marat/Sade (pictured), which managed to upset some of Stratford’s townsfolk Photograph: Tristram Kenton
English National Opera has made a habit of asking star names from outside to try their luck at directing opera. The results have been mixed (Mike Figgis's Lucrezia Borgia was an expensive mistake), but in ex-Python Terry Gilliam they found a gem – his interpretation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust was one of the theatrical events of the year. And, unusually for a project of Gilliam’s, it appears to have been impressively disaster-free Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The same could not be said of the Broadway stage musical version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which has been the most troublesome production anyone seems able to remember. After a series of stage accidents forced repeated closures (and hospital stays for several cast members) and early responses proved almost entirely negative, producers took the unusual approach of shutting the production down for a major script rewrite, as well as bringing in a new director and getting U2’s Bono and the Edge to create a sprinkling of fresh songs. The critical verdict since wasn’t glowing, but the show continues to sell well – which it will need to do if it wants to claw back its reported $65m production costs Photograph: Jacob Cohl
July saw another half-century, this time since the first UK performance by the Mariinsky ballet (formerly known as the Kirov). The company enjoyed a three-week residency at London’s Royal Opera House with a programme that included Swan Lake, led by Uliana Lopatkina as the Swan Queen. Their interpretation, according to the Guardian’s Judith Mackrell, “remains definitive”, if “strangely drained of life”. (Then again, Konstantin Sergeyev’s production does date back to 1950.) The company also performed the Pepita/Gorsky Don Quixote and works by Balanchine and Robbins, in what was one of the ballet year’s big events Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis
August can only mean one thing in the British theatre calendar: the Edinburgh festival. It might not have been a vintage year, but there was still much to enjoy – from the controversial production of Ontoerend Goed’s Audience and the international festival’s Asian theme, to another excellent year of shows at the Traverse theatre, including Mission Drift, The Wheel, Ten Plagues and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. It wasn’t all good news, though: not long after the event one of its main venue operators ended up going bust, owing companies thousands of pounds Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Rupert Goold’s much-anticipated production of Decade saw a group of 20 writers offer responses to the 10 years that have past since the 11 September attacks in New York. Staged in an office block near London's St Katharine Docks, which had been transformed to resemble a restaurant at the top of the Twin Towers, the show interwove stories from writers including John Logan, Simon Schama and Abi Morgan, and was all delivered with Goold’s traditionally flamboyant directorial style. The results were mixed but impressive – a landmark performance by any estimation Photograph: Tristram Kenton
An altogether more celebratory anniversary came in October when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (seen here in its most recent incarnation) clocked up a quarter of a century in the West End. The show (the second longest-running musical in London) is the most globally lucrative single piece of entertainment of all time, outgunning even movies like Titanic. The event was marked with a special gala at the Royal Albert Hall, which reunited members of its former casts, including Lloyd Webber’s old squeeze Sarah Brightman Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
Theatreland went overboard on the awards front as usual, with November hosting four major ceremonies – the Evening Standard awards, the Britain-wide Theatre Awards UK, the Clarence Derwent and the Peter Brook Empty Space awards. Winners included Peter Hall (picking up a lifetime achievement award), Sheridan Smith (a pair of best actress awards to add to her Olivier) and Matilda, which picked up a Best Musical gong at the Evening Standards before it had even officially opened in London Photograph: Tristram Kenton
2011 has been a game of musical chairs, with new artistic directors at the Donmar, the Bush, the Gate, Birmingham Rep and Salisbury Playhouse, as well as at the RSC – but the biggest surprise came with the news that the Royal Court is to lose both its artistic and executive directors. The smart money is on Dominic Cooke (pictured) taking over the NT – though ex-Donmar head Michael Grandage could also be in the frame Photograph: Richard Saker
