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Susannah Clapp’s best theatre of 2021

Little Amal stirred hearts, Chaucer hit Willesden, Cush Jumbo was a perfect prince, and once again James Graham said it all

It was a year of promises and postponements, of dodgy mask-wearing in the stalls – and of sudden soarings. It was no surprise that Rebecca Frecknall’s spectacular production of Cabaret, with Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne, should prove one of the big excitements of the year – and one of the most expensive. But who in the Pre-Puppet Era (before The Sultan’s Elephant and War Horse) would have thought that a three-and-a-half-metre-tall creature made of wicker and fabric would prove such a powerful reminder of how the theatre can stir hearts and stretch eyes?

Little Amal, the child-refugee puppet who walked from the Syrian-Turkish border to Manchester, was pelted with stones in Greece, danced in Trafalgar Square, became an ambassador for political change – and for the imagination. She was a reminder of how theatrical truth does not depend on naturalism: as were the small white daemon puppets that lit up the stage like Chinese lanterns in Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, and the marvellous driftwood creations that scuttled and sashayed through Lolita Chakrabarti’s version of Life of Pi.

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