I don't want to spend my entire life responding to Nick Hytner, but something he wrote in the Observer yesterday made me chuckle. We theatre critics, he suggested, are stuck in our little boxes and don't know what's happening in other arts. I laughed because, after a particularly heavy week for plays, I'd just been to see Darcy Bussell's farewell appearance in Song of the Earth at Covent Garden. And, on Sunday, I drove down to the beautiful Grange Park Opera House in Hampshire to see David Fielding's new production of Prokofiev's The Gambler. So we critics don't get out enough? A night in would be a refreshing change.
I can't pretend every weekend is like this. Sometimes I just laze around, see friends or watch cricket on telly. But, although I'm a naive spectator, I love dance and had booked for the Royal Ballet's triple-bill months ago, not even knowing it was going to be Darcy Bussell's goodbye. What drew me was a combination of works by Ashton, de Valois and MacMillan. I'm especially fascinated by MacMillan because of his powerful sense of the dramatic and his unorthodox choreography: at one point in Song of the Earth Bussell is required to entwine herself horizontally around the bodies of her lover and the messenger of death (Carlos Acosta) and touch her toes with her fingertips. Even "physical theatre" rarely makes such demands on its performers.
As for opera, I've been going regularly since the 1980s. It was the famous "powerhouse" seasons at the Coliseum - when David Pountney, Mark Elder and Peter Jonas were in charge - that demonstrated something was happening on the opera stage that wasn't taking place in straight theatre: an adoption of the techniques of European expressionism. And, over the years, I've often seen theatre people doing their most exciting work in opera. I've seen nothing better by Robert Lepage than his double-bill of Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung for Canadian Opera. And only recently Improbable's Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch did a production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the Coliseum that was quite breathtaking in its inventive use of space.
Of course, one can't see everything; and I concede there are huge gaps in my knowledge. Although I was once a film critic - or perhaps because I was once a film critic - I don't get to the movies as often as I might. I now crave something special from the cinema on the lines of The Lives of Others: a truly great film by which everyone I know has been affected. As a gallery-goer, I'm also deterred by the massive crowds that you now find at big London exhibitions: what I love are quiet provincial galleries on wet Tuesday afternoons. And I admit that pop isn't something I easily appreciate.
But I would still challenge Hytner's argument that theatre critics are culturally isolated. Two things in particular changed my own life. One was having the luck to present a lot of radio arts programmes in my salad days, which meant that I was exposed to everything on offer. The other was a lecture by the late John Drummond when he was director of the Edinburgh Festival. He told me, far more brusquely than Hytner, that theatre critics were incapable of pronouncing on the Festival because we stuck to our own discipline. John told me to go to the press office and order as many tickets for dance, opera and music as I could. I've always been grateful for his instruction, which opened new doors.
And, to bring the argument full circle, I remember first meeting Nick Hytner when I interviewed him about his production of Wagner's Rienzi for ENO. So maybe, just maybe, we drama critics aren't quite such one-trick ponies as he makes out.
