THEATRE engages the senses like few other entertainment forms.

Great drama grabs you by the throat, great comedy by the sides of your rib cage - and the perfect mix of either grabs you by the heart.

This year Glasgow has seen a collection of great, heart-grabbing theatre plays.

Carole King’s bioplay Beautiful stormed the King’s Theatre, the perfect mix of storyline, music and a few laughs thrown in.

The Play That Goes Wrong again proved to be one of the funniest comedies ever staged in the UK.

Set in the world of am-dram, we see the fictitious Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society stage a performance of The Murder of Haversham Manor.

And anything that can go wrong does. But the play reveals an insight into the amateur actors who think they’re professionals, the hopeless and desperate for attention.

The creators of The Play That Goes Wrong also came up with A Comedy About A Bank Robbery (“Ocean’s Eleven Meets The Marx Brothers”) which almost matched its stablemate in terms of laughs.

But theatre doesn’t have to have Broadway-sized budgets in order to be incredibly successful.

The Tron Theatre offered up one of the best theatre productions in the past decade with a new production of Pride and Prejudice.

The adaptation of Austen’s famous work saw 117 people reduced to a cast of just five females, who played both sexes.

The result was an exhilarating show Austen would have loved.

The same theatre later in the year offered up a warm, insightful and honest play in the form of Martin McCormick’s South Bend, the autobiographical take of the actor/writer’s student days in Los Angeles, and how he found love. And then madness dressed up as love.

The title of the play comes from the town South Bend, Indiana, which is where the writer found himself, in pursuit of the woman of his dream - who actually created his worst nightmares.

What a reminder we can’t always judge books by their gorgeous covers.

It’s not always the case that huge financial investment in a show produces an incremental critical result.

But sometimes epic theatre – in every sense of the word - can come about, and Sting’s The Last Ship was a clear case in point.

The story featured on the end of the shipyard-building era, set in Tyneside, yet it could just as easily have been set in Govan.

The tale of a young man returning to his roots to find devastation resonated, but rock star Sting managed to combine a range of musical genres, from folk to Latin American, to produce an incredible soundtrack.

The Theatre Royal became a giant, vibrating, welcoming ship, and from that came a gigantic response.

But yes, size doesn’t matter when it comes to creating theatre that makes an impact.

This year Glasgow’s Oran Mor basement theatre produced two stand out plays. Oscar Slater – The Trial That Shamed a City – told the turn-of-the century tragic story of Slater, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant sentenced to death in 1909 for the brutal murder of 83 year-old Glasgow woman, Marion Gilchrist. But he didn’t do it.

Stuart Hepburn’s script and direction was crisp and hugely effective, with great performances from Kevin Lennon, Ashley Smith and Ron Donachie.

Yet that, to me, wasn’t the outstanding offering of the Play, Pie and A Pint year. Change In Management featured the story of a perceived sex pest, and David Gerow’s play managed to reveal how perceptions and misplaced concern can result in chaos and false accusations.

But this wasn’t a social worker pamphlet of a play. The writer cleverly used hysteria as a comedy device and the result was sharper than a cutting comment.

That was this year. Yet, already next year in theatre looks to be especially promising. In January, former Scottish Youth Theatre student Scott Miller will play the lead role in the National Theatre production of War Horse, playing at the Armadillo.

In the same month, the phenomenal Glasgow Girls runs at the King’s Theatre. Cora Bissett and David Greig’s hit show is based on the true story of seven teenagers from Drumchapel, whose lives changed forever in 2005 when their school friend and her asylum-seeking family were forcibly taken from their home to be deported.

The self-titled ‘Glasgow Girls’ took a stand to fight for her rights, and ultimately the rights of all children of asylum seekers.

In February it’s hard not to be excited about the National Theatre’s production of Macbeth, which descends upon the Theatre Royal.

It stars Michael Nardone of the Night Manager fame in the lead role, an actor with real weight and the charisma to play the tortured king.

Take to the seats and enjoy.