Our theatre critic casts an eye over the highlights of the year ended and what to book for in 2014 ­­­uccessive generations of English dramatists have lived with the fact that their efforts are always likely to be overshadowed by a writer who died in the seventeenth century. Only a year after complete cycles of his work featured in the cultural Olympiad, 2013 turned out to be a veritable festival of William Shakespeare.At London’s National Theatre, Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear delivered, under the direction of Nicholas Hytner, probably the strongest Othello that modern British theatre has seen: finding every facet of the play’s poetry, comedy and tragedy within an unusually coherent modern updating to a British military base overseas. At the Manchester Internati