Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide.

You'll feel guilty for having bothered with a programme after seeing The Lorax, the Dr Seuss adaptation that puts saving the environment centre-stage at the Old Vic just as the recent climate change gathering in Paris has done on the world stage. Full of unimpeachably good intentions, the production is fun and frolicsome up to a point, and sometimes simply bewildering.

While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground in Cardiff.

The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close’s lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discrepancy between seeming and being. Which is the theme, too, of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ peerless epistolary novel.

The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. What previously played as a somewhat wearing Wildean pastiche here assumes creepier colours as a play about two brothers gifted with language who use words in part to forestall the bleakness that lies in wait when things go silent. 

Christmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of authority and the playful representation of evil. There is always a danger when a tradition that thrives on predictable tropes is re-invented, but Sally Cookson, after her very successful productions of Peter Pan and Treasure Island, has once again made something immensely original and new, while paying homage to this particularly British seasonal entertainment.

Past wrongs cast long shadows. Following the passing of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, successive Australian governments favoured migrants from English-speaking countries in what was called the White Australia policy. Between 1945 and 1968, for example, more than 3,000 British children were sent to the antipodes and told they were orphans. They expected the sunshine of a new start; what they got was the darkness of abuse.

The pleasures to be found in the pitfalls that are part of live performance rear their accident-prone head yet again in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the latest exercise in controlled (or is it?) chaos from Mischief Theatre, the young and clearly very resilient troupe that is gradually extending its farcical tentacles across the West End.

The first surprise in the Traverse Theatre’s seasonal production comes on entering the theatre – being led backstage, then onto what’s normally the performing area, and finally to two ranks of audience seating either side of a gently undulating transverse strip of stage.

Widely hyped as “an Alice for the online generation”, and “a coming-of-age adventure that explores the blurred boundaries between our online and offline lives”, this version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories is advertised with a poster that shows a Cheshire cat whose smile is more drug-addled rictus than quizzical grin. On the other hand, the team behind the show features three creatives who should be working at the top of their game: Britpop legend and opera composer Damon Albarn, playwright and scriptwriter Moira Buffini and National Theatre supremo Rufus Norris.