The very best and worst

'Fatal Attraction' which clearly fits into both categories equally. I haven't laughed so much at a show in years.

My best is possibly still Propeller's Richard III, but I haven't interrogated that for a few years so it could be subject to change.

I never thought I'd hate anything more than We Want You To Watch at the National, but then I saw Ivo van Hove's Obsession and I was sadly proven wrong.

Same here for Damned By Despair - I laughed for 10 minutes straight afterwards, it was so bad. Never going to forget it!

The Genuine best production I find very hard to pick, to be honest - there’s a collection of productions that gave me what I like to call ‘a theatre high’ - that I had that actual physical reaction to. Made me hold my breath, my heart race, had that peculiar moment when the room seems to change size around you, laugh so hard that my face ached afterwards, made me cry. But choosing one of those as ‘the best’ is impossible!

Worst musical production: Gone with the Wind (Carnaby street runner up)
Worst Play production: Polar bears, though I also hated Obsession

Best musical production: Hairspray original west end production, it made me fall back in love with musicals and was magical for me.
Best play production: Jerusalem, tied with Lear at the donmar with Derek Jacobi both haunt me still. With an honorable mention to Anna Christie at the Donmar, mostly for Jude Law's entrance.

For me

The worst musical production - the last Saturday Night Fever tour (the actor-musician one) - The producers should have been shot for even putting this on.
The worst play - The NT’s The Prisoner (75mins of mind numbing theatre).

The best musical - Mamma Mia! (It’s my guilty pleasure!)
The best play - Angels in America (Andrew Garfield’s performance over 6hrs was just on a different level to anything I’ve seen)

My opinions on best would change, depending on when you ask me, but this year I'm saying Six!

The worst thing I've ever seen was probably Desire Under the Elms in Sheffield last year. Or possibly that awful Pinter thing with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, OR that godawful Merchant of Venice in Stratford with the giant pendulum and the tealights.

Best - Billy Elliot, Here Lies Love, The Ferryman and the Martine-less My Fair Lady.

Worst - Blood Brothers, We Happy Few - a desperately sh*te 3 hour plus vanity project by Stubbs, Nunn and Juliet Stevenson and the utter tedium of the Nationals in-I in which Juliette Binoche is hung on a wall via a giant magnet. With honourable mentions for Ian Richardson stinker The Creeper and the TRHaymarket version of The Country Wife.

I mean do we really have to ask?

Best: Angels. I am Marianne Elliott’s bitch forever.

Worst: Hamlet, Wooster Group. I’d say it was my uncultured 22 year old soul...but most of our group was bored and those were some pretentious wankers I was with.

Runner up Shakespeare to the one where there were ensemble pretending to be a free and a snake.

Runner up to Aspects of Love on tour for being a terrible production of a mediocre musical.

Worst - The Trial at the Young Vic. I will never get these 2 hours back. Felt like 20. God, how I suffered. And the guy next to me was actually snoring.

Best - A View from the Bridge, also at the Young Vic. People, Places and Things. The Dazzle. A Monster Calls. Apparently I have a disturbing tendency to enjoy the shows that make me cry buckets. Masochist.

That said, I've realised I saw dozens and dozens of shows that left me indifferent. I can't say anything about them. And that, I think - a show that doesn't make the audience feel anything - is somehow worse than a really horrible piece of theatre.

Yes! Especially as after a while you HAVE seen it done well (that was my first Hamlet too)

On Hamlet, honourable mention to Clwyd’s Hamlet (where my friend was actually the Dane) while far from bad, didn’t give us an interval until after he’d got back from his bloody travels...to be or not to be was a question we were all asking no matter how good it was.

Best - Faust (Punchdrunk).

Could eaaily have been others of theirs but this was the major breakthrough and has affected me ever since. An experience akin to conscious dreaming.

Worst - Vieux Carre (Wooster Group).

The third time they’ve been mentioned already I think. A random staging of a weak late Tennessee Williams olay. Emerging in the sixties (as the Performance Group) they stopped being relevant decades ago but the lack of state funding in the States has meant that they were little challenged and allowed to prosper.

Best ever production of a musical has to be the NT/Richard Eyre Guys and Dolls with the original cast of Julia Mackenzie, Bob Hoskins, Ian Charleston and Julie Covington.

This is a difficult one. I could count Michael Boyd's Henry VI trilogy that set off my love for Shakespeare, as well as Richard II a year later. The ones that made me cry (Derek Jacobi's King Lear, the Old Vic's A Christmas Carol, Les Miserables), beam with joy (Maria Aberg's As You Like It, The Clockmaker's Daughter, Loveday Ingram's The Rover, Mary Poppins), laugh (Gregory Doran's Love's Labour's Lost), sit on the edge of my seat (Tim Piggot Smith in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Henry Goodman in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Barrie Rutter in Rutherford and Son) or downright uncomfortable (The Nether)

Or I could count the brilliant writing from plays like James Fenton's The Orphan of Zhao, David Haig's Pressure, Annie Barker's The Flick and James Graham's This House. And how about the phenomenal work some of the smallest and fringe venues deliver such as the Arcola Theatre's Carousel, the short-lived Twickenham Theatre's Sweeney Todd, Southwark Playhouse's Carrie. Or the phenomenal interpretations directors brought to plays like Rupert Goold's The Merchant of Venice.

As for the worst, I could easily count the Wooster Group's Troilus and Cressida, but to be honest I was fascinated watching this train wreck in slow motion. I'm almost pleased that I got to see a production like that. It didn't make me mad

What did leave me seething was Rachel Cusk's Medea. A play where the dialogue felt as natural as someone's blog post rants and after sitting through all that the changed ending left me livid.

All of my best seem to be from around the same time, probably because I was falling hook, line and sinker for all the theatre could offer: August: Osage County, Our Class, London Assurance, After the Dance, Earthquakes in London at the National; Jerusalem, Enron, Cock, Love Love Love at the Royal Court; A Streetcar Named Desire, Red, King Lear at the Donmar. It would seem I quite like Mike Bartlett. Nothing seems to grab me in the same way anymore.

Absolute worst was Saint George and the Dragon at the National. Half a semi-decent idea in search of a play. Appalling execution.