Performance: Hurst's 'Hamlet' season highlight

By PETER CALDER

The year's best work on stage was the oldest. Michael Hurst demonstrated his claim to being our 21st century version of the old-style actor-managers, directing and starring in a version of Hamlet which made it a sleek, dark drama about a dysfunctional family.

His performance was an unalloyed pleasure because he approached the text with such intelligence and sensitivity that even the famous soliloquies sounded as if we were hearing them for the first time. Dizzyingly exciting, it was unquestionably the best reading of a Shakespeare tragedy and possibly the best local Shakespeare ever.

Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poetry, The World's Wife, dates back only to 1999 but the stories it told ranged over thousands of years, bringing to life the wives of Aesop, Icarus and Faust, as well as more recent women, such as Myra Hindley. Fiona Samuel, who adapted some of the poems for the stage, was the star of a fabulous trio whose performances exulted in the richness of the writing.

The visit of the excellent Pete Postlethwaite in the one-man show Scaramouche Jones was probably the year's biggest disappointment. A retrospective of the century past and a meditation on the nature of being human, it was hampered by an extraordinarily showy script but the actor's performance was barely impressive.

The show sold out, thanks to a titanic publicity campaign and earned this reviewer - who is unrepentant - his biggest-ever bag of hate mail.

Another of our veteran actresses, Geraldine Brophy, created a small gem in The Viagra Monologues which teased out men's relationships with love, manhood, sexuality, fatherhood and, just occasionally, their penises.

She had an uncanny ear for the way men talk and a skilful theatrical sensibility in shaping it, and a fine trio of actors inhabited characters aged from 3 to 68. If there is any justice, this will play on Broadway and in the West End.

Simon Prast signed off from the ATC with a polished production of a terrible play in The Graduate. The writer, an Englishman, Terry Johnson, managed none of the screenplay's coherence, making romantic slapstick of a series of vignettes, but the performances, particularly Elizabeth Hawthorne's lipsmacking Mrs Robinson, made it seem much better than it was.

David McPhail's one-man show Muldoon, an extension of a caricature he created in 1977 for the television show A Week Of It, was full of zinger one-liners and an evening of good honest actorly graft but was essentially a one-note performance which rarely had any of the poignancy it needed to be memorable rather than just entertaining.