What Reigned Supreme on the London Stage in 2009? Our Top Five Picks

London in 2009 had a distinctly royal flavor on stage, and for once, we’re not talking the Royal National Theatre (a venue that has taken to dropping the “Royal” in recent years). While Britain’s flagship theatrical address had a new play triumph in Alan Bennett’s latest The Habit of Art, it was the smaller Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square that shone throughout the year. The chamber-sized Theatre Upstairs offered one revelation after another, from Alia Bano’s genial Muslim-themed comedy Shades to Wallace Shawn’s scintillating shaggy dog story Grasses of A Thousand Colors to Mike Bartlett’s controversially titled Cock, starring Ben Whishaw. Yes, the theater year saw big musicals (Sister Act, Priscilla), star vehicles (Jude Law headlining Hamlet), and revivals by the dozen, but as our top five shows indicate, the Court was the destination that more often than not reigned supreme.

1. Jerusalem
Here's an intriguing parlor game: name the best British play since Arcadia. A candidate for that accolade arrived on the Royal Court main stage this year in the form of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, a deliberately untidy, inordinately exciting three-act play featuring at its center a character in the drug-dealing reprobate Johnny Byron who will surely become iconic, along the lines of, say, Stanley Kowalski. Mark Rylance's occupancy of this astonishing role has already left spectators grasping at superlatives, the affection in which both he and this performance are held there to be seen at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards where his best actor win brought the room of industry types instantly to their feet. The play moves to the West End in January for a commercial run. The question about a Broadway future isn't if but when.

2. Tusk Tusk
The accepted wisdom is that sophomore plays tend to be where writers stumble, so it was with surprise, delight, and not a few tears that we responded to Polly Stenham's first play since her career-defining That Face, which has its New York debut this spring. Tusk Tusk is an even better play: its exploration of parental abandonment is startling and disturbing in ways that go beyond the shriek with which director Jeremy Herrin's flawless production began. The show enjoyed too short a run at the Royal Court's studio-sized Theatre Upstairs, its tenancy limited by the school obligations of a mostly young cast. So all the more reason to cry, “Encore!”—as long as neophyte performers Bel Powley and Toby Regbo haven't grown too old.

3. Arcadia
A play thought to have been definitively served in its original London premiere at the National 16 years ago, Arcadia shone just as brightly in David Leveaux's West End revival. The new production even managed even to improve on the Trevor Nunn original in some ways. Boasting a cast that included author Tom Stoppard's son Ed in a breakout performance, this new incarnation made especially keen sense of the modern-day passages of the play, pairing young Stoppard's impassioned Valentine with the emotionally cautious writer and critic, Hannah, played wonderfully by Samantha Bond. This shift in emphasis in no way diluted the enduring appeal of one of the great stage "couples" in contemporary drama—the Byronic tutor, Septimus Hodge (Dan Stevens), and his prodigious protégée, Thomasina (Harry Potter alumna Jessie Cave). The play closed in September but deserved a second look: any chance of reviving this revival?

4. La Cage aux Folles
Yes, this production first played the Menier Chocolate Factory at the very end of 2007, but 2009 was the year that saw it happily ensconced at the Playhouse throughout a series of West End cast changes of which allowed audiences repeated appraisals of the tenderness and wit of a Terry Johnson staging that made sense of such diverse leading men as Graham Norton, John Barrowman and, especially, Roger Allam as well as the superlative Douglas Hodge, who will reprise his extraordinary Albin/Zaza on Broadway in April, opposite Kelsey Grammer. Not only does Hodge convey sensitivity, his ace comic timing second to none. All this from a burly actor who made his career in Pinter, Shakespeare and Chekhov? The theater truly is a remarkable place.

5. A View from the Bridge
Utter fearlessness on stage is hard to come by but one finds it repeatedly in the theater work of Ken Stott, the Scottish actor now making his Broadway debut in God of Carnage, a play he first co-starred in on the West End. London audiences, meanwhile, this year felt the pleasurable frisson that comes with Stott's innate authority in director Lindsay Posner's scorching revival of A View from the Bridge, the Arthur Miller play that tends to be well served in London. (Michael Gambon blazed a trail as Eddie Carbone some two decades ago.) Lending sterling support to Stott's quietly thunderous turn as a man in thrall to forces he can neither accommodate nor explain was expat American actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Eddie's beloved if aggrieved wife, Bea: pain on stage, perfection from the vantage point of the audience.