This staging of Nick Payne’s beekeeper-meets-physicist love story from 2012 extended the frontier on how to stage a revival. Photograph: Marc Brenner 4 Constellations New frontiers … Russell Tovey and Omari Douglas in Constellations. Both versions were sensational, encapsulating the queasy extremes of online voyeurism and toxicity, but so gripping that it became impossible to look away. Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s serrated satire about a social media influencer and the jealous obsession her posts inflame was performed on stage by Kelly Gough and filmed with Leanne Best for the BBC. Greg Hersov’s production had its bumps, but if there is a play defined by its lead it is this one: Jumbo’s sublimely clear, charismatic performance pushed everything else into the shade.

Two remarkable Hamlets came along this year: Ian McKellen’s age-blind prince, let down by Sean Mathias’s patchy production for Theatre Royal Windsor, and, at the Young Vic, Cush Jumbo’s androgynous antihero. But it played a blinder by casting Ralph Fiennes, whose transformative performance was vulnerable, intense and full of a certain grandeur. This audacious and uncompromising co-production by Theatre Royal Bath and Northampton’s Royal and Derngate took a big risk in staging TS Eliot’s intellectually challenging, interconnected poems about mortality, faith and the meaning of life. Marisha Wallace, as Motormouth Maybelle, blew the roof off with her gospel number. It also had the most magnificent songs, high-energy choreography and ingenious sets that kept getting bigger and better. Laying aside its white saviourism, this musical still resonated in its critiques of racial prejudice and conventional femininity.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian 8 Hairspray

Magnificent … Marisha Wallace as Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray.

Indecent theatre