Mark Shenton's top venues: Young Vic

I’m back on home turf for my latest top venue. Previous picks on my doorstep include Southwark Playhouse and the Menier Chocolate Factory, and I’m unashamedly staying local with my choice of the Young Vic, which is less than 15 minutes walk from my flat.

These are all local theatres with a wider reach: Southwark Playhouse is now also in King’s Cross with London’s most vibrant musical, In the Heights – and has also travelled this year to Toronto with Titanic, for which a big US tour is also being planned. A couple of weeks ago in New York I saw a show each from the Menier (The Color Purple, opening officially on Broadway on December 10) and the Young Vic (A View from the Bridge, which opened on November 12 to rave reviews).

While the Menier’s Broadway track-record over the last few years has been very impressive, with its productions of Sunday in the Park With George, A Little Night Music and La Cage Aux Folles also travelling Stateside, the Young Vic has been just as impressive in bringing the world – from Broadway, but also other places – to the Cut. One of my favourite Broadway musicals of the decade, the intense and moving The Scottsboro Boys, found a natural home at the Young Vic before transferring to the West End’s Garrick Theatre.

Peter Brook continues to call the Young Vic his London home, with regular transfers of his shows from the Theatre Des Bouffes Du Nord in Paris (the next being Battlefield, based on the Mahabharata, running from February 3-27). Here, too, Australian director Benedict Andrews has stripped away and reinvented classics like Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to invigorating effect, with the latter to be revived at Brooklyn’s St Ann’s Warehouse in April with Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby reprising their London performances. Joe Hill-Gibbons, the Gate’s former artistic duo of Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami, Katie Mitchell and Richard Jones have continued to make exceptional work here, too.

Alongside the Young Vic’s core group of established directors, the theatre also does much to work with a next generation of emerging directors through its Genesis project, and is also home to the annual JMK Award for young directors previously profiled in The Stage. This year’s winner Liz Stevenson will direct Barrie Keeffe’s Barbarians in the Clare Studio from November 27-December 19. One of the Young Vic’s own directorial discoveries Matthew Xia will direct a new production of Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange next May.

Another unmissable show is Clare Lizzimore’s stunning production of Mike Bartlett’s Bull, which returns to the Maria from December 11-January 16. I’m also intrigued by Jane Horrocks’ new piece, If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me, from March 10-April 16, described as “part gig, part dance piece”. And there’s a new production of Macbeth that similarly straddles theatre and movement (running now to January 23), co-directed buy Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin, with John Heffernan and Anna Maxwell Martin leading the cast.

It’s a place you always visit with a spring in your step. Though I’ve sometimes had cause to complain that the thriving bar and restaurant is a victim of its own success – it’s busy before a theatre audience even join it, so that during intervals there is nowhere for them to go – I will sheepishly admit that the bar has become one of my favourite spots to meet people for interviews or meetings. It’s close to the tube, the coffee is good (and reasonably priced), and you can usually find a quiet sofa or corner upstairs to hide in. And in the summer, there’s nowhere nicer than the upstairs terrace, looking out over the Cut.