The cream of the crop

If you were to look for a single individual who epitomises the brightest and best of London theatre in 2003, Nicholas Hytner would be the absolute winner. Not for the first time in the past decade the National has been the source of our prime theatrical engagement.

Hytner, who succeeded Trevor Nunn in April, cut all the more flamboyant a dash because the West End commercial stage, which in far-off evenings was the generator of excitement and even new plays, has continued its long day's journey into decrepitude.

I heard a clever, veteran producer the other day lamenting that it would cost him nearly half a million pounds to premiere a new play in the West End. But the cost of production only half explains why there is only one straight play in town, the dreary comic farce See You Next Tuesday, which has not transferred from a subsidised theatre.

No wonder desperate, opportunist producers tried stand-up comedians and elderly, sit-down-and-suffer revivals of classics like Adrian Noble's dismal A Woman of No Importance, in which most of the cast offered lessons in how not to play Oscar Wilde. Anthology musicals, in which the songs of dead entertainers are sung-along all over again, accumulated.

There were beacons in the darkness. The West End transfer of the Tricycle's production of The Price, Arthur Miller's drama of anguished fraternal rivalry - sharply directed by Sean Holmes - offered a performance of overwhelming emotion from Larry Lamb, and Warren Mitchell's old Jewish antique dealer was its comic match.

In Anthony Page's production of The Master Builder, a remarkable newcomer, Lisa Dillon, achieved a mesmerising erotic hold over Patrick Stewart's oddly muted Master Builder. Old-comer Franco Zeffirelli scored with Pirandello's curiously modern, almost unknown Absolutely! (Perhaps). And Polly Teale notched a terrific double, writing and directing After Mrs Rochester, her expressionistic take on the haunted, haunting life of novelist Jean Rhys.

These flashes of West End excitement serve meagre comparison with Hytner's skill in stamping a fresh, youthful identity upon the National. His thoroughly modern-dress version of Henry V caught the freshly politicised spirit of the theatrical times, with Adrian Lester all got up in khaki and offering smug Blairite sound bites as a ruthlessly unsympathetic monarch gone to war for our country's good or betterment. When before had Henry V been at once so satirically amusing or so disturbing?

Hytner's programme did, it is disconcertingly true, mainly ignore pre-20th century classics. But his choice of new plays was unerring. Kwame Kweh- Amah ' s Elmina's Kitchen, with its black-on-black killing, and Owen McCafferty's Scenes From the Big Picture, about Northern Ireland, were prime state-of-the-nation messages. Michael Frayn's Democracy, a fascinating, polarised view of a West German political leader and the spy in his private office, was my play of the year. But Martin McDonagh, formerly my bête noire and other people's adored enfant terrible, ran not far behind. In The Pillowman, he linked a nightmare of child abuse to psychological torture in a totalitarian state.

Jerry Springer - The Opera restored to the theatre the brazen, shock appeal and mocking contemporaneity that Brecht and Weill managed decades ago with the far more political The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny - now there's a suitable show for the National to rediscover. In O'Neill's mammoth epic Mourning Becomes Electra, not seen in London for 40 years, Helen Mirren seethed and seduced. John Guare's His Girl Friday, a fresh adaptation of The Front Page with Alex Jennings at his comic best, screamed out for West End transfer.

Elsewhere, the Royal Shakespeare Company, still reeling from its folly in withdrawing from a fixed London base, saw Michael Boyd succeed Adrian Noble. Before Boyd took over, the company mounted an alluring London season of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's best near contemporaries, persuading me that the RSC ought to delve further into the library of lost Jacobethan drama. Boyd's next season will be the real test of the company's survival.