Yesterday we took a look at the Best Shows of 2008. Today let's focus on the most unforgettable performances of the year. Happy New Year!

David Calder, King Lear
One can theorize for longer than it takes to act Shakespeare’s mightiest tragedy about the ways and means of the Bard but sometimes you’re best off purely surrendering to the emotional minefield his plays possess. That was made easier than is usually the case by Calder’s unusually empathic, intelligently spoken Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe: a portrait of a man adrift in a psychic wilderness who on this evidence has clearly only begun to howl.

Elena Roger, Piaf
Any thought that the diminutive Argentinian’s star turn in Evita was a West End one-off were dispelled by her blazing star turn as the doomed French singer: an icon about whom one might think one had heard enough in the year of the much-laureled La Vie En Rose only to encounter Roger’s Piaf and be poleaxed anew.

Kenneth Branagh, Ivanov
Michael Grandage’s yearlong Donmar residency of the West End got off to a fine start with an early Chekhov play that tends to get more London airings than are commonly acknowledged. Leading a high-octane company (special kudos to Kevin McNally playing a father of the bride to remember) was onetime stage regular Branagh, here back on the boards evincing a humanity he didn’t always show during all those years when he was busy making his mark. In a year that found Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming on view at the Almeida, Branagh’s West End homecoming afforded its own reason to cheer.

Jessica Stevenson Hynes, The Norman Conquests
Amidst a thespian sextet as close as one comes to perfection, Hynes’s lovesick Annie impressed with the sort of unforced naturalness that simply can’t be learned; such gifts are as instinctual as they are rare, and Hynes was amazing, whether communicating in a single stroke years of an aggrieved relationship with her (unseen) mother or reaching across a seemingly impassable divide to communicate to her beloved if emotionally clotted=2 0Tom (Ben Miles). One is tempted to urge Hynes to start exploring the Chekhov canon, except that by so illuminating The Norman Conquests in all its Chekhovian affect, one could argue that she already has.

Edward Bennett, Hamlet
A theater year full of front page news stories about understudies (Broadway’s Jeremy Piven, anyone, or Christian Hoff?) met with the happiest of endings in the case of Gregory Doran’s first-class production of Hamlet, when a sidelined star in David Tennant was replaced at the press performance (and for weeks to follow) by a febrile, compulsively moving Danish prince in the production’s Laertes, Edward Bennett. In a town not exactly given over to standing ovations, Bennett’s opening night cheers rang out loud and clear. And richly deserved.