1. Sea Breeze | Winter Gardens, Morecambe

The industrious audio-visual collective Imitating the Dog seemed to be everywhere this year. They created graphics for The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon, the Dukes’ Lancaster and Oldham Coliseum’s tribute to the pioneering Edwardian film-makers; while their high concept adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms toured the country. But it was the company’s contribution to this beguiling re-animation of a deceased music hall that truly sent shivers down the spine (and not merely because Morecambe’s cavernous Winter Gardens has no heating).

Laurel and Hardy played the Morecambe Winter Gardens, as did the Rolling Stones and somebody called Professor Duncan with his Wonderful Performing Collies. Sea Breeze, jointly produced with Live at LICA and Raisin and Willow captured the ephemera of those glory days in a play of light that astonished much as the first cinematograph and magic lantern displays must have; less a product of technology than the influence of witchcraft.

Imitating the Dog is a loose umbrella of academics, polymaths and programmers, led by an unusual triumvirate of directors. Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks are drama professors and authorities on the work of the Wooster Group, whose radical aesthetic ItD closely resembles. The third core member, Simon Wainwright, is a whiz at adapting technology originally developed for flight simulators, and is also a member of the alternative rock band Hope and Social.

The ItD experience isn’t for everyone. It can be disconcerting watching actors perform to camera and the dialogue is often in a foreign language – the most recent instalment of the visually scintillating but frankly baffling Kellerman series was partly, for no very obvious reason, in Chinese. But the company is at its most persuasive when there’s no linear narrative to worry about, which is what made this ghostly seaside sonata so successful.

2. Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited | Laugharne, South Wales

It was hard to escape notice that 2014 was Dylan Thomas’s centenary year. Theatr Clwyd celebrated with Terry Hands’s pitch-perfect production of Under Milk Wood. But National Theatre Wales went one better, inviting you to the south Wales village on which the poem was based, issuing you with a map and encouraging you to discover how deeply peculiar Thomas’s adopted home was for yourself.

3. Memories of August 1914 | Liverpool

They do like a giant walkabout in Liverpool. The return of Royal De Luxe’s crane-operated Goliaths eclipsed their previous appearance in 2012’s A Sea Odyssey, drawing crowds of over one million people and prompting the council to declare it the biggest outdoor event in the city’s history. It wasn’t always easy to see and almost impossible to follow. But for one hot weekend in July, giant fever was palpable.

4. Beryl | West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

The Tour de France came to Yorkshire in July with an entire cultural festival in tow. Maxine Peake’s drama was the highlight: an affectionate tribute to the five-times world champion Beryl Burton, who funded her international triumphs by working on a rhubarb farm and whose time-trial record, set in 1967, has never been broken. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of her?

5. Kes | Crucible, Sheffield

Barry Hines’ classic novel has become a film, a stage play and a musical: it just required Jonathan Watkins’s dance-theatre version to complete the set. Former Royal Ballet principal Watkins is a local lad who well knows what it feels like to grow up mocked and misunderstood. But the production was chiefly memorable for a wonderful cast, who really looked like the portly PE teachers, spindly librarians and spotty kids they were supposed to be, rather than an ensemble of finely-honed dancers.

6. Dead Dog in a Suitcase | Everyman, Liverpool

Kneehigh were back to their breathtaking best with this scabrous retake of the Beggar’s Opera by Carl Grose. Mike Shepherd’s production was over-stuffed with all the thrills and spills of the circus; but it was Charles Hazlewood’s score that stole the honours. There are not many composers cool enough to convincingly connect traditional folk ballads with grime, ska and dubstep. But miraculously, Hazlewood pulled it off.

7. Queen Coal | Crucible, Sheffield

Bryony Lavery’s exhumation of old scores from the miner’s strike featured a creepy, mute contribution from a Margaret Thatcher effigy that was ritualistically burned. But this loose dramatisation of real events that took place in the Yorkshire village of Goldthorpe was equally memorable for the pre-performance installation by designer Max Jones, which took you as close to a pit face as you are likely to come without being penned in a cage and plummeting 250 feet underground.

8. The Crucible | West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

James Brining’s revival of Arthur Miller’s classic took a calculated risk, superimposing the time when the play was written upon the era in which it is set – how else do you explain a 17th century puritan kitchen that has acquired an electric cooker? But the jarring anachronisms (microphones at a witch trial, no less) jangled even louder in the context of more current whistle-blowing cases.

9. Krapp’s Last Tape | Crucible, Sheffield

Polly Findlay’s revival starred Richard Wilson. At least, that’s what it said in the programme: the lighting levels were so dingy you could barely see him. But it was Wilson’s distorted and unmistakably lugubrious voice emanating from a ring of tannoy speakers, underlining the point that Beckett’s 1958 play had as much in common with the tape experiments of composers such as Stockhausen and Xenakis than anything else going on in the theatre at the time.

10. Monday’s Child | Theatre Royal, York

A drama for under-sevens about the impact of dementia sounded like an impossible sell. But Brendan Murray’s play, produced by Tutti Frutti, observed that it is often the youngest members of the family who most easily adapt to relatives suffering from memory loss. Wendy Harris’s sweet production about a young girl and her grandmother was plaintive but never depressing: “You come every week and we play till teatime, remember?”