We are all well aware that choosing the "best" of anything is largely subjective. Here is one critic’s opinion of the top performances of 2007.

Simon Scardifield

Simon Scardifield, The Taming of the Shrew, Old Vic (January)
In a year rife with blazing Shakespearean performances, a Propeller company member by the name of Simon Scardifield set the bar astonishingly high back in January playing the eponymous "shrew," Katharina, in the director Edward Hall's blazing all-male production of this always problematic text. Coupling fury with erotic fire and without a trace of camp, Scardifield set a new bar for this most bruising, and bruised, of Shakespeare heroines. In Scardifield's assured hands, the play's ending has never delivered more of a jolt, Kate's submission here the indication of a woman tamed but at huge cost to her tempestuous soul.

Kristin Scott Thomas

Kristin Scott Thomas, The Seagull, Royal Court (January)
Marking at once a peerless farewell and a no less glorious return, the Royal Court's production of Chekhov's near-ubiquitous play signaled the adieu from his Chelsea base of Court Artistic Director Ian Rickson (he has since been replaced by Dominic Cooke) even as it welcomed to that address Kristin Scott Thomas in her third, and finest, London stage role to date. Playing the preening actress Arkadina, Scott Thomas of course conveyed the character's beauty: how could so exquisite a woman not? What she also illuminated was the wit of a woman as funny and occasionally scalding as Arkadina is vainglorious. "Say what you like about me; I do know how to dress," she at one point remarked. Scintillating, and then some, is all I'll say.

Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith, The Lady From Dubuque, Theatre Royal Haymarket (March)
At a time when the two-time Oscar-winning septuagenarian could be watching her garden grow, Dame Maggie Smith returned this year to her most adventurous foray yet into the canon of Edward Albee, following West End appearances in Three Tall Women (not once but twice) and A Delicate Balance. But neither of those star turns began to prepare one for the shimmering delicacy of Smith's occupancy of the title role of Albee's tricky 1980 play, which reached London in surely the most underappreciated production of the year. Making her entrance within seconds of the first-act curtain, Smith formed a gracious if crucial member of a terrific Anglo-American ensemble that included her real-life son, Christopher Larkin. Was her "lady from Dubuque" a symbol or a flesh-and-blood woman, mother to Catherine McCormack's dying Jo or not? Smith made the play's abiding mysteries both matter and hurt in a performance so haunting that I saw it twice.

Conleth Hill

Conleth Hill, Philistines, National Theatre (May)
It's one of the joys of the National Theatre to be able to allow so many actors to develop their careers in full view of an audience at a single address. And so it has triumphantly proven for Irishman Conleth Hill at the South Bank venue where he has played a singularly riveting spy in Michael Frayn' s Democracy and a Christmas Eve reveler unafraid to play cards with the devil in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer (in which Hill can now be seen on Broadway). But the two-time Olivier Award winner excelled himself as the pipe-smoking cynic Teterev at the brittle, unmistakably beating heart of Maxim Gorky's Philistines, a company effort in which Hill nonetheless was primus inter pares. It's not easy to bring down the house with the single word, "wow," but Hill managed precisely that and very much more. Wow, indeed.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Othello, Donmar Warehouse (December)
Why not let the Bard bring the year full circle by praising to the hilt the heart-stopping Othello proffered by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the director Michael Grandage's immensely pungent Donmar production of that same play. What, an Othello that isn't about its Iago? Such is the case with a staging that was sold out weeks in advance on the strength of the Shakespearean debut of a notably starry Iago in Ewan McGregor but in fact stays with you due to an Othello of uncommon sweetness that—once soured by jealousy—is horrifying to behold. Ejiofor was hard to miss this year—partnering Kristin Scott Thomas (see above) as Chekhov's Trigorin and then on screen in Ridley Scott's epic American Gangster. But this actor has never registered quite so resonantly as he does playing the Moor, his wounding litany of "damn her" suggesting the astounding Lear he will surely one day make.

Take a look at Mark Shenton's Top Five Performances of the Year!