Stage Struck

Boxing clever: PETER CRAWLEYon the year in cardboard

PICK A cardboard box, any cardboard box. How can something so boring be so interesting? You can lift it above you, despite its bulk, and, with a wince of effort, pretend to be a strongman. If it’s big enough, climb inside. As a kid you could see geometries of possibility; as an adult you wouldn’t want to live in one.

Anything packed with metaphor has artistic potential. In literature, The Cardboard Boxis a Sherlock Holmes adventure and the name of a self-help book; in art it's a transient medium for painting and sculpture; on screen it's the stuff of horror ("What's in the box?!?"). That may be why this year's theatre was stacked with them: A box can be anything it likes.

There were some astonishingly elaborate designs, such as Sabine Dargent's gore-flecked swimming pool for Penelopeand the dazzling, crumbled city of Sodome, My Love. Yet the shows that left the most lasting impression used the least durable material, making maximum impact with modest means.

If you missed As You Are Now So Once Were Weat Absolut Fringe, next month you can marvel in the Peacock at how the complexity of an entire city can be created from something so defiantly simple. The actors construct towers, bedrooms, clubs and theatres, sweeping them around with the visual fluency of camera shots that pan and zoom through Dublin. It is a marvellous and subtle tribute to Joyce's Ulysses, the neatest of nods: from page to stage, but essentially still on paper.

As You Are Now'sdesigner, Ciarán O'Melia, also furnished Barabbas's work in development, City of Clowns, with stacks of boxes for a different effect. Its performer, Raymond Keane, broke out of one with brutal effort, like a force of energy kept in long storage. It was a self-reference for a company that had its funding cut at the start of the year, just as its activities were listed with a tick of each box. These boxes were full of potential, Barabbas knew, but there was something desperate in them too.

That was the point of Grace Dyas's He's My Brother I Love Him, a short, disorienting piece about homelessness for DePaul Ireland, in which Conor Madden performed for an audience of one inside a cardboard box. The box combined the fun of a kid's fort – it was full of surprising devices – with the friction of a troubling dream. You were relieved to emerge, but the voices still clung to you.

Anything this versatile is susceptible to overuse. Even before Teatr Polski's The Danton Caserendered revolutionary France as a cardboard shanty town, or Paul O'Mahony, working with sturdier material, turned The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badlyinto an ingenious unfolding crate, you may have become nostalgic for CoisCéim's Boxes, which unpacked this potential 10 years ago.

Still, I’m not sure we need to put a lid on it just yet. With some imagination and ingenuity, theatre makers can put anything into a box. Told to think outside it, they stop and think about it.