A MIXED year, with Shakespeare's Roman plays inevitably reflecting the political chaos of our own times. Outstanding was Antony and Cleopatra, largely owing to Josette Simon’s queen, whose “serpent of old Nile” shifted moods mercurially and magisterially stage-managed her own suicide.

Two new plays by Richard Bean bookended the year — The Hypocrite in the RSC’s The Swan, a combined Hull Truck/RSC production celebrating Hull’s City of Culture 2017 — and Young Marx, opening London’s splendid new The Bridge Theatre. Both marked the playwright’s characteristic treatment of farce at the heart of history.

The former, dealing with the political chicanery around England’s 17th-century civil war, lends itself to a pantomime treatment in which the royalist Prince Rupert and the Duke of York are spies disguised as fishmongers who are planning to blow up parliamentary Hull’s armoury.