FROM Maoist China to game-show dystopia, via the jazz-filled streets of 1920s Chicago, 2016 has undoubtedly been a theatrical roller coaster of a year.

Dominic Cooke’s fabulous production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the National Theatre certainly set a fiery precedent. A superb cast brought the raw frustrations of a newly urbanised African-American population to life in a production that asked acutely resonant questions in a year where the idea of post-racial society was shown to be as hollow as it’s always sounded.

A sign of the future came in the form of Remote at the Camden People’s Theatre, which raised some profound points about how technology is slowly creeping into every facet of our existence.

The interactive game show-style production is typical of a unique theatre which is consistently pushing the boundaries and providing a fertile breeding ground for experimental work, at a time where such spaces are becoming increasingly fallow.

That’s why Emma Rice’s departure from the Globe Theatre is so frustrating. The two productions I saw there — Caroline Byrne’s The Taming of the Shrew and Matthew Dunster’s Imogen — had the blood-thumping energy the space deserves and Rice’s departure signals a retreat to more traditional, and possibly uninspiring, productions.

There were stunning performances from Billie Piper in Yerma at the Young Vic, despite the hideously crude interpretation of Lorca’s classic.

Anne-Marie Duff was magnificent, as ever, in Ella Hickson’s Oil — a riveting history at the Almeida Theatre of Britain’s relationship with petrochemicals— and special mention must also go to Danny Mellor for his amazing efforts in his one-man depiction of the miners’ strike in Undermined.

My favourite play of the year was Papatango prize-winner Orca at the Southwark Playhouse. Depicting the chilling manipulation of a sexual abuser in a remote fishing village, Matt Grinter’s debut work, with a delicately devious text, left an indelible impression, with Carley Langley and Rona Morrison delivering eye-catching performances.

Looking back on 2016, it’s hard to ignore the fact that women were at the forefront of almost everything that was truly exciting about theatre. Let’s have less retreat from that and more power to their collective elbows.