Oh dear. This time last year I blogged a series of five cultural resolutions for 2008. Looking back, I think I kept only two of them. I can plead mitigating circumstances. I spent much of my spare time in the first half of the year trailing round the book festivals plugging State of the Nation. And, in the autumn, I directed a Pinter triple bill with LAMDA students: a blissfully happy experience but one that devoured most of my time.
So where did I fall down? Principally, in resolving to see more movies and exhibitions and explore modern dance. With movies, I am only mildly repentant. After spending five nights a week watching plays, my appetite for sitting in darkened auditoria diminishes: especially when, as with commercial cinema, you are surrounded by noisy popcorn-crunchers. I did see two great oldies - Pabst's magnificent Pandora's Box and Chabrol's Le Beau Serge - in the comfort of the Barbican and the Lumiere. I still aim to catch Garrone's Gomorrah and eagerly anticipate Daldry's The Reader. But, after reading Peter Bradshaw's and Philip French's columns, I sense that modern cinema is filled with what John Osborne once called "an effluence of celluloid."
I feel much more guilty about exhibitions and modern dance. I mean to get to Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery very soon but could kick myself for missing the Russian show and Hammershoi at the Royal Academy, and Peter Doig at Tate Britain. As for dance, I feel sorry about not slotting in the return of Wuppertal Tanztheater, whom I first saw at the Adelaide Festival in 1982 – long before most London dance critics. At least I can claim, on the operatic front, I got to Harrison Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: a brilliantly dramatic and accessible piece, assured of a place in the canon.
But, going back to the resolutions, I did read more modern novels this year. Not new-minted ones but I did catch up, long after everyone else, with Jonathan Coe. His What A Carve Up struck me as the best dissection of the devastating effect of Thatcherism I have ever come across: also, as aficionados will know, a wonderful postmodern mix of cinematic and literary allusion. After that, I dived into Coe's The Rotters' Club, which catches perfectly the angst of adolescence in the 70s.
I also would claim, modestly, to have stuck to my resolution to be "open to experiment without succumbing to fashionable trendiness." I remained stonily unmoved, for instance, by Katie Mitchell's attempt in ... some trace of her (notice the pretensions of the lower-case title) to turn Dostoevsky's The Idiot into a piece of live cinema. Conversely, I loved (though others didn't) Enda Walsh and Theatre O's freewheeling version of The Brothers Karamazov, Delirium, which caught something of the vertiginous madness of the original. So where does that leave me? Remorseful about my continuing cultural gaps but resolving to do better next year.
