ANY round-up of theatre productions can throw up some strange bedfellows. This year's harvest is no different, highlighting the wonderful diversity of performers and themes on show in the last 12 months.

The Edinburgh Festival provided a cornucopia of live theatre, from the banal to the brilliant. Among the 63 countries represented in 753 shows, BAC Beatbox Academy's Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster stood out.

Six youngsters blew audiences away with a dynamic reinvention of Mary Shelley's classic which tackled contemporary social issues. Conceived as a "live concept album," the thrilling vocal soundscape, ranging from slick beatboxing and original rap numbers to haunting, soulful harmonies was inventive and mesmerising.

Slick choreography and gig-style lighting enhanced the intensity and originality of the piece, which got a standing ovation when I saw it.

In London, non-West End venues showcased much of the year's theatrical creativity and drew in a wide range of audiences from the first-night "darling brigade" to the ethnically mixed and youthful.

Hampstead Theatre's Cost of Living was an unsettling and eye-opening account of disabled people and their carers at opposite ends of the wealth spectrum. This Pulitzer-prize winning drama, directed by Edward Hall, neither pulled its punches nor wallowed in despair.

Double-amputee actress Katy Sullivan's near-drowning in a bath while her carer, played by Adrian Lester, is out of the room was one of the most heart-stopping moments of stage action I can recall.

The Trafalgar Studios continued to challenge the West End diet of musicals and star turns at astronomical prices with an eclectic mix of affordable new work in its intimate Studio 2.

Short-listed for the Man Booker prize, Chigozie Obiome's novel The Fishermen was brought to the stage as a two-hander. David Alade and Valentine Olukoga were outstanding as brothers reliving the characters and events from their past.

The simplicity of the story and the set — an arc of bars bedded in sandbags — belied the profound, elegiac tragedy at the heart of this tale of Nigeria.

A vengeful prophecy levelled at one of the boys, after taunting a local madman, was played out with all the inevitability of a classic Greek tragedy.

Bristol Old Vic is still in the process of successfully reinventing itself after a multi-million pound redevelopment that highlights its history as well as attempting to locate itself at the heart of the community.

Its main house produced a wonderfully entertaining Cyrano with a bravado performance by Tristan Sturrock as the eponymous proboscis-cursed hero, while its Weston Studio has been imaginative and adventurous in its varied programming.

Successes from the Edinburgh fringe, small-scale touring productions and locally commissioned new work such as Extraordinary Wall of Silence, a largely non-verbal show exploring the troubled history of sign language, have lit up a versatile, subterranean space and kept regional theatre on the map.