An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. Set in 1930s Hollywood and, in flashback, in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, it is a kind of celluloid fantasia that charts a path from the shtetl to the stars. Films, for young Motl and the people of his village, are flickering, silvery dreams; a way of capturing a moment in time forever, of preserving memory, of drawing a connective thread between the present and the future.

Suddenly, it seems as if the brawling youngster that was once new writing for the British theatre has grown up. Now, all it wants to talk about is the family, about having babies, and about what it’s like to be a parent. In Nancy Harris’s new play, which opened last night, the dubious joys of parenthood in an upper-middle-class family are eclipsed by the unexpected arrival of a new nanny. The inevitable question soon comes screaming at you: whose hand will be rocking the cradle?

Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and opened in London last night. For about 90 minutes, we watch the ups and downs of the marriage of Maggie and Billy across four decades and through several leaps into the unknown. In its ambition, beauty and delicacy, this is a ravishing piece of work.

Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.

Absent or abusive fathers are a staple of British drama. As such, they are both an explanation for ferocious male violence and a metaphor of a paternal state which, in an age of austerity, seems ready to abandon the needy to their own devices. In Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton’s punchy play, which is a remarkable collaboration between a woman born in 1948 and a man born in 1984, the consequences of a father’s abandonment of his children are played out with chilling logic.

In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.

Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)

Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Its splendid cast and conductor Leo Hussain worked as one to enhance the paradoxes of its terrible beauty.

In a year when eyes turned to London for the riots, the budget cuts and the hacked phones, there seemed to be a fair amount of middle England portrayed by British creatives. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National retold 2006’s Ipswich murders as a darkly comical contemporary musical, with middle-aged gardening competitions and dull community-centre realism success. Tracey Emin’s retrospective, Love is What You Want brought Margate’s grey, salty waters to the South Bank through giant blankets and explosive short films.