It’s apt that a drama set among soldiers should be presented with military precision; but corruption, cruelty and perversion can lurk amid the human innards of the machine of war, and in Nicholas Hytner’s well-oiled, impeccably paced production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the chainlink and concrete of an army base house scenes of cruel humiliation.

In spite of a text that feels at times like Shakespeare by numbers, Andrew Hilton’s tightly-knit company has once again pulled off an evening of captivating theatre. As in other productions from Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the casting is pitch-perfect and the acting first class, down to the star performance of a hilariously mournful black dog.

"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to the lowest reaches of human experience.

Unsurprisingly, it was an ambition long held and within the grasp of the actor Edward Petherbridge to play Lear, widely regarded as the summit of a classical thespian's career, when, in New Zealand to take on the part in 2007, he was struck down by not one but two strokes.

There has always been a keen air of propulsion to the career of James McAvoy. He made his name on television in State of Play and Shameless, while early film roles in Starter for 10 and Inside I’m Dancing swiftly promoted him up the leading man’s ladder to appear in The Last King of Scotland, Atonement, The Last Station, X-Men: First Class and, as of this month, Welcome to the Punch.

The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate objects.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.

The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2005. McAvoy was Joe Macbeth, a Glasgow chef passionate about his work, the restaurant kitchen where he worked a fitting place for the play's blood and gore.

Performing Shakespeare in a former cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual requires a dedicated space and the red-tiled floor on which the drama unfolds on this most intimate of stages has taken on a certain aura. With the minimum of sets and props, a deep probing of the text and the minimum of modish theatrical artifice, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory proves year after year that less is more, at least when it comes to awakening the imagination.

Far be it from me to try to impose shape or meaning on the past 12 months of television. You'd need teams of statisticians and psephologists to have any chance of drawing conclusions from the whirling cosmos of TV, and its infinite variety of soaps, shopping, repeats, weird sports, ailing current affairs programmes, forgotten comedies and obscure dramas. Instead, in a spirit of shameless subjectivity, here are 10 of my favourite performances from 2012.

For much of 2012, London theatre seemed to celebrate the playhouse as much as the play, turning certain venues into essential destinations. I'm thinking, of course, of Shakespeare's Globe, whose mindblowing Globe to Globe season - its namesake's canon performed in as many languages as there are plays - redefined the concept of marathon well before the Olympic athletes came to town.