Weird Danish Moments

I thought I’d got to know the Danes and their blunt, earthy sense of humour well enough. Apparently not – I was taken aback so much by this sign at the till of one of the ubiquitous ‘Joe and the Juice’ branches in Copenhagen city centre while waiting for my juice, that I had to surreptitiously get my camera out of the handbag quickly to take a shot before Aragon himself (I assumed) turned around with the juice:


The return flight was on the same tiny propeller (seating: two-plus-two rows, twelve of them) that I had flown out with (they look dubious but both flights were the most punctual I’d taken out of London in years). Being the Friday afternoon flight, it was packed to the rafters. There were a family of five sitting around me: the middle-aged parents plus a son of about fifteen in the row in front, two girls slightly older across the aisle. Together they were a picture of the quintessential Scandinavians – tall, blond, blue eyes, with the air of Copenhagen urbanites. Then, just as we were about to take off, they suddenly extended their arms to one another, across the aisle and seats, and held each other’s hands tightly. The pair of sisters stroked one another’s arms up and down for additional comfort and assurance.

I would usually like to think of myself as liberal and racism-free, but frankly if we had been on a transatlantic transporter and them a family of Muslims, I probably would have screamed for attention at this clear display of impending collective martyrdom. As it was, I could only guess that it was a case of genetic fright of flying that could only be assuaged by this peculiar form of physical bonding. As soon as we were safely airborne, the finger-locks were withdrawn and they all slumped back into newspaper-reading and Ipod-hopping, respectively, leaving me wonder what unusual encounters lay ahead in our Moroccan trip, commencing in twelve hours.

In praise of... The Longevity of Geniuses

My memory of this week has, frustratingly, been defined by the constant battle against a vicious cold/flu (tbc – probably a mixture of both) attack which, as of now, seems to have no end in sight. Year after year, I had hoped to evade the winter germs, but what with daily commute on a variety of public transports combined with a sealed ‘open plan’ office (one of the major blights of modern civilisation), it was doomed to be hope in vain. The only comfort is that colleagues who piously queue up to get their flu jabs each autumn don’t ever seem to manage to prove the potency of the injection at all. I’ve always defiantly opted out of the jabs, so if we’re all getting the same germs anyway, at least I can (somehow) be content with the thought that I don’t have the extra shot of unidentified chemical substance in my system on top of everything else.

Out of a week’s mental state of near-total blur (inevitable, when your nostrils are hopelessly blocked – they are located quite close to the brains after all), two events stand out, and they do have something significant in common. On Tuesday we had Steve Reich back in town, who graciously took his bow again and again after the breathtaking performance of his 1970 classic ‘Drumming’ by the Colin Currie Group at Queen Elizabeth Hall. [Disclaimer: Colin is a dear friend and this article is not going to focus on the concert itself. For totally objective reviews who all heap praises on the performance, check the London broadsheets.] That composition date immediately gives the game away: it was hard to believe that this magical piece was written 40 years ago. The cultural landscape has shifted away – quite a long way away – from the modernist rigours that Reich and his peers were working against at the time. But the work itself has truly passed the test of time, and in each of the three live performances I have heard of it over the last four years (one with Reich and Musicians, two with the CC Group), it was as fresh, mesmerising, challenging and exhilarating as ever – all of these things at the same time. And if the size of the returns queue on Tuesday was anything to go by, I am not alone in being an addict to this music.

But I digressed. I was really going to remark on the Steve Reich conversations that I witnessed that day – one that I was actually a part of (a business meeting discussing programming plans for a major feature of his music next year), and the second was his post-concert talk with Colin on stage. I had to intermittently try to convince myself that we were really talking about those concert plans in the context of his forthcoming 75th birthday (the last big birthday four years ago was celebrated ‘in style’ with festivals in New York, London and elsewhere). Seventy-Five?! Not that long ago, most people would be very happy to live to that age, even in developed countries. But this guy talks and moves about with the sharpness, lucidity, humour, agility and energy that most thirty- year-old guys walking down the street will never possess. At the meeting, I would have happily sat there for hours more to hear him elucidate on Baroque music, African music, DNA, and the atomic bomb, but we had to stop because he had another four meetings to attend to before the evening concert. (And I was still trying desperately to breathe like a normal person.)

As if to prove my point, the other musical celebrity for the thinking man that I encountered, the very next day, was a sprightly octogenarian. It was National Theatre’s Platform event (40 minutes of on-stage interview, followed by Q&A) with Stephen Sondheim, the first of many events to take place in London this year to mark his 80th birthday. This was one of the rare Platform events to be held in Olivier, the largest of the three auditoria in the building, and all eleven hundred seats were packed to the rafters before the talk began. As the great man walked on to the stage, the assembled fans erupted with applause – he got a standing ovation before having even uttered a word! In the next sixty minutes, he gave the most fascinating and thoughtful account of his early days working with Oscar Hammerstein, (briefly) of his formal studies with Milton Babbitt (!), of the working method he used while collaborating with the stellar roll-call: from Hammerstein to Bernstein to Harold Prince. This was, as much as anything else, a chance to hear a living, breathing encyclopaedia of the history of musical theatre recollect the highlights of a half-century’s repertoire, and I was especially heartened to discover that the attentive audience was far from a roomful of grey heads. As with the previous evening’s audience at the Reich concert, it was a rather even spread of ages and genders. The twenty-year-olds seemed to have no less connection to a work like Sunday in The Park with George or Sweeney Todd than their grandparents, and Sondheim answered their questions not with the manner of an elderly statesman, but as a cerebral, witty, genial creator of those timeless works who could easily beat anyone forty years his junior in a debate.

With great creative people like these, you do expect the intelligence to ripe beautifully with old age, but the agility and quick-wittedness that both these guys exuded embody an eternal youthfulness so startlingly, that you have to believe the potency of creative power itself – more than anything that science has come up so far, it gives us the hope of eternal youth. Reich has his composing schedule utterly full for the next few years – the concept of ‘taking a break’ probably shouldn’t exist if you’re perpetually inspired by life itself – and Sondheim coyly revealed at the end of the talk that he had ‘been working on something’ for the last few years which would see the light of day soon. And I remind myself of Louise Bourgeois (89), of Paula Rego (75), of David Lodge (75), of Alan Bennett (76), of Elliott Carter (102) – all of whom are reaching new heights in their respective genre with each new work they give us. If we’re at least able to easily comprehend the senescence that these names are associated with, consider the fact that Stephen Spielberg is 64, Paul McCartney 68, Dustin Hoffman 74 (I know, I was quite startled by this too when I searched online)… The list goes on and on. The lesson seems simple: Create, and Live a Long Youth. In this order.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part III

#5: The Moment of (Dream) Childhood Revisited
Disneyland, Paris
August 1999

When we arrived in Disneyland Europe, on Day Four of our great Inter-railing trip, I was twenty-one years old and a bit. A real adult, in other words. Even though I had lived in the UK for two years by this point and had got quite fairly accustomed to the way of life here during this time, the maiden voyage to the Continent – the word immediately implying a vast body of land separate from the snug British Isles, at the other end of which lay my true home – still offered up that unique sense of thrill. And the first three days in Paris had been filled with proper, adult itineraries – the museums, the neighbourhoods, the cafes. I had looked forward to the Disneyland trip as a belated childhood treat, but not anticipated any great excitement about it. Thanks to the ‘reform and opening up’ policy of the Chinese government, my generation – the first single-child generation – had been fed on a TV diet of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, though limited to thirty minutes every week, usually on a tiny black-and-white TV screen. The world of Disney was, for the Chinese population of 1980s at large, one of many a gateway that had all of a sudden appeared, to the exciting land that was the materialist, Capitalist Western world. But those of us under twelve, we were utterly oblivious to the ideological significance of those characters at this crucial time in our nation's history. We simply adored them – all voice-dubbed in Chinese – as much as our American counterparts, and the scarcity of their appearance made any virtual encounter with them all the more precious.

We joined the expectant crowd for the daily parade down the central boulevard, and when the ‘magical world of Disney’ soundtrack sprang into life, with the full cast of fantasy characters emerging in their impeccable costumes, my eyes inexplicably welled up (to my great annoyance). In this moment, what had all those years ago existed as the Other, distant, fantastic but alien world, decidedly out of reach except on TV screens, was finally reborn as part of My world. I was there, Minnie Mouse was smiling and waving to me, and this whole surrounding – in 3D, complete with soundtrack – was no longer Myth but a cultural discourse of which I could claim participatory experience, complete with heat and sweat. The dreamland, right there and then, dusted off that dizzying, alluring aura, and entered the diary as just another memorable destination – even for a twenty-one-year-old.


#4: The Moment of Charmed Arrival
Levoca, Slovakia
April 2000

Unlike some of the other off-beat destinations where we’ve left our footprints over the last 12 years, this one hasn’t become the Hot Spot on any Frequent Traveller’s Map, and probably never will be. But this quaint, enchanting little town in north-east Slovakia will forever retain a special place in our hearts, in part thanks to the unexpectedly ‘grand’ hotel where we ended up – well, to be precise, the manager/receptionist who was truly one-of-a-kind.

We had arrived in Levoca station after a creaky train journey from Bratislava, and all the coughing and nose-running I had tried to battle off over the previous two days had chosen this moment to metamorphose into a fully escalating fever. The two uphill miles from the station to the town centre seemed even longer in the rain that was just that little bit too malicious to be called drizzle. The hotel in question, right in the middle of the old town square, was listed in the ‘Top End’ category in the guidebook, and sounded unimaginably lavish by our standard at the time. It turned out to be our only choice by default after the discovery that the other, more budget-friendly option down the road, had closed for good.

Having sign-waved our way through numerous conversations in various small Czech and Slovakian towns by this point, we were startled when the only member of staff on duty opened his mouth with what could only be described as a mock-Basil Fawlty accent. ‘Ah, welcome to Levoca. I trust your stay shall be peaceful’ – meaning, as we discovered thirty seconds later, that we were the only guests in the hotel (and, by deduction, the only tourists mad enough to have come to this part of the world at this time of the year). Then, when being presented our passports – ‘Ah, I believe you are the first Chinese visitors we have ever had here.’ When being quizzed about weather in the following days – ‘I’m afraid the weather is expected to be unfavourable.’ Unfavourable! The last time I had heard anyone utter the word in real life was, well, actually no one ever spoke like that in Newcastle. W’ther’s go’a be shite, more likely. We ended up staying there for three full days and I have wanted to revisit Levoca ever since. To this day, not only was it the only hotel in all our hard-travelling years where a truly elegant suite (with art deco bathroom, complete with free-standing bath) cost fifteen dollars a night, but the memory of such ineffable charm, effortlessly exuded by one single person in the most unexpected place, always brings a smile to my face. These are the moments that make travel addicts out of us.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part II

#7: The Moment of Farce (aka The Journey from Hell)
Train journey from London to Manchester
January 2007

This was the Day of The Great Gale. True enough, all the other severe wind conditions before or since, as least as I've experienced in London, have been mere breezes in comparison. But nothing really justifies the way it turned out to be the Day of The Great Farce, as I’m about to tell you now.
This was also the first day of the annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, this particular year being held in Manchester. Having been accustomed to the vast array of possible reasons obstructing normal operations of any form of British public transport, I wasn't entirely surprised when the 9:35am train I was supposed to embark on was cancelled before departure. It did mean that the passengers from two near-full services would be packed into one, the 10:05am train. I could take this, I thought. But little did I know that that was barely the beginning of what was going to be a very long day indeed.
Five minutes after the train pulled out of Euston station, the announcement came on that due to weather-related speed restriction, the journey would take five hours instead of two and a half. A sea of very un-English groans duly ensued, mostly – rightly – pointing out the absurdity of delaying this news until just after departure. About half the passengers in my carriage commented that they would have opted not to make the journey at all had they known. Well, it seemed that Virgin Trains knew exactly what they were doing – imagine them having to deal with all those refunds if that had been the case.
So we traveled on, at the greatly reduced speed of 55 miles per hour (supposedly – it felt slower). There were intermittent (unannounced, unexplained) stops along the way in between stations, so by the time we ground to a halt completely at Tamworth station, just outside Birmingham, it was well past one o’clock. After a thirty-minute pause, the announcer informed us that we were, well, to be held at the station indefinitely, because a tree had fallen on the tracks some twenty miles ahead and – I’m not making any of this up – ‘a team of engineers were on their way to the site with a view of removal of the said tree’. It was also advised that we got ourselves something to eat and drink at the station, especially as the shop on the train had sold out every last pack of crisps some time ago. I reacted quickly enough to be near the front of the queue at the single tiny shop at the station, where the flustered lady-in-charge was clearly bewildered by the sight of a meandering file of some two hundred customers suddenly materialising in the hope of getting their hands on the five sausage rolls she had for the day (my guess was that she usually had about seventeen customers a day on average). I succeeded, but the one hundred and ninety-seven people behind me had to make do with Maltesers and Mars bars – until they also ran out at customer No. 134, that was.
Back in the carriage, just as I foolishly started to feel smug about the warm sausage roll and the cup of tea I had gulped down, darkness fell – all the lights and, worse, the heating, suddenly went out. We must have, subconsciously, all been preparing ourselves for a very long doomed destiny with this journey, for by the time the next announcement came up ten minutes later it was greeted not by rage or even disbelief, but bemused roaring laughter. The new development was so utterly surreal, it could only be a true-life incident on a British train journey:
‘Ladies and gentleman, you will have noticed that we lost our power about ten minutes ago. I regret to inform you that not only were the engineers who arrived at the site unable to remove the fallen tree, the tree has apparently caught on fire, which has caused the entire West Coast main line to be out of power, and therefore this train – along with all other trains currently stopped between London and Manchester – will not be going anywhere today…’
Was there a happy ending to the story? Perhaps I should have sought a way back to London – geographically it would have made (just a little) more sense, but professional duty propelled me in the other direction, and I ended up in a rental car with two complete strangers, fellow young female professionals who were both returning home to Manchester after a work trip to London. My navigation skills faced the ultimate challenge – and proudly passed the test with flying colours – as we went through a whole maze of small country lanes across Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire (all the major roads were totally bottle-necked thanks to the weather and the railway fiasco) with nothing more than an old-fashioned road atlas courtesy of the rental company. SatNav? What was that? The three of us quickly bonded over an almost primal urge of taking things into our own hands, especially after all those hours we had spent on the farcical train journey that never ended. By the time I turned up at the conference it was just past 9pm, and the day has henceforth gone down in the memory lane – and to anyone willing to listen to my one hundredth retelling of the story – as ‘my epic eleven-and-a-half-hour journey from London to Manchester. Boy, was I determined to get there or not!’


#6: The Moment of True Community Spirit
Ultra-triathlon, Sado Island, Japan
September 2009

We found out that our weekend in Sado Island – our first-ever visit to this stunning part of the country where most Japanese have not visited – was going to coincide with the famous ultra-triathlon when booking our car ferry journeys. We did it just in time to get the tickets we wanted, but couldn’t help pondering whether one of our only three days on the island would be seriously disrupted by this big event on a small island. The new friends we made on the day before the race waved off our concern with a hearty smile: ‘Don’t worry at all! We’re very laid-back about these here – you’ll see.’ He also confirmed that the race would consist of 9km of swimming, followed by 140km of cycling (circling the entire island), and finally 45km of running. M beamed. I gulped.

The next morning, we took to the coastal road after breakfast, around nine o’clock. The second leg of the race was in full swing, and it was impossible not to be impressed by the gusto with which the cyclists were flying by us, considering they had done more swimming before I even woke up than I had ever done in my life. Our friend was right – there was no major-city marathon-style mania. Everything seemed, in distinctly Japanese manner of course, perfectly in order, with the clockwise side of the costal road reserved for the formidable triatheletes and the counter-clockwise side functioning as usual for us mere mortals shamefully moving about in our four-wheeled vehicles. There were the occasional policemen at major junctions, but mostly to bow their courteous bow and smile their courteous smile at similarly well-behaved motorists, rather than undertaking any ‘police duty’. So were there no cheerers with banners at all then, you ask – that fundamental element to all such events that keep the people going (especially as, let’s face it, the distances involved here are anything but human dimensions)? Well, the London/New York-sized crowds are nowhere to be seen, these toughened human beings perhaps do bristle at the idea of having their families traveling to this remote corner just to cheer them on, and for a short stretch of the road you do wonder if things are not a bit too much on the quiet side. But then you start to notice the locals sitting by the kerb, literally just outside their own front doors. Many were sprightly-looking septuagenians and beyond – Japan is known for its nation-wide longevity, and Sado Island is not a chosen destination of the young by any means. They pop themselves on little hand-made wooden stools, wearing a simple hat to shield the unforgiving sun, and cheer for each and every brave man and woman passing by in a rather quiet, understated manner. Catching these captivating sights at 50mph, I suddenly felt like being placed in an Ozu frame at slightly more modern pace, a beautifully seductive prospect. But then, at approximately five-hundred-meter intervals, there would be a bigger gathering of multi-generational families, usually led by an earnest female in her thirties, lifting – we slowed down especially to ascertain – large bowls of freshly-cut, mouth-watering (we knew because we had stuffed ourselves with them since arrival) local fruits. The pragmatism of taking pick of these seemed at once problematic, but they were a truly delightful sight compared with all the Lucozades that would be on offer instead along Tower Bridge or First Avenue. After all, for every cyclist intent on having a winning place in the race and was hard enough not to be allured by the juice watermelon chunks, there would be four who were grateful that they were there. They did not scrimp on their time so much and would stop for a few seconds and exchange a grateful smile with the ladies, take a much-needed mouthful of vitamin-filled liquid food and nod the emphatic thanks, before charging on. The race was meant to be an international gathering, proved by the dozen or so foreign faces we saw on the return ferry to the main land the next morning (although the universally expired look did not differ by nationality or any other criteria). Yet to me its exceptional charm lay in that easy, local feel. I certainly would never again be able to watch a marathon, live or otherwise, without thinking about those diminutive, smiling elderlies, or the ladies with their heart-warming fruit bowls.

Cuban Diaries - Preface

Our Cuban encounter really began in June of last year already, when we found ourselves at what was evidently the most popular event of the ‘Cuba 50’ celebrations at Barbican Centre, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution. It was a memorable evening, as much for what was on stage as for the audience itself. I had, uncharacteristically, booked the event without much knowledge about any of the acts: an aged, Buena Vista Social Club-esque salsa band, an excellent young jazz trio, and finally, as the main act of the evening, a second half of nueva trova with Pablo Milanes and a small synthe-acoustic band. Judging from the ecstatic response from the Spanish-speaking crowd around us (an exceptional audience demography even for the Barbican, perhaps), we could tell he was a bit of a national icon, a Cuban Elton John of sorts. But then again, the spontaneous mass sing-alongs, which ended up accompanying almost every number he belted out, seemed to contain just a little more than mere passion for the music itself. After all, the guest of honour for the evening had been Madame Guevara, daughter of El Che himself, and the words ‘struggle’, ‘solidarity’, ‘freedom’ had been more than just recurring themes in her impassioned five-minute speech.

There was a certain sense of indefinable, quiet determination in the behaviour of the audience at large, even though the majority of them would presumably have been living in London for a while. They didn’t seem to want to make a big Patriotism manifesto out of the evening (whatever the intention of the event’s organisers had been), and yet the natural, effusive sense of pride, for the achievement of their artists, was acutely palpable and very, very infectious. At the time I was still ignorant of Milanes’s own eventful life story so far, which had included extended persecution by the government because of his homosexuality, ultimately redeemed by officially-endorsed icon status. That fact that he was now firing up the nostalgia of two thousand immigrants – a mixture of legitimate ones and exiles, I could only assume – seemed to carry more than a touch of irony.

The evening fascinated me in so many ways already, and I really, really couldn’t wait for our trip to begin, to see this ‘Land of the Miracles’ (as Steve Smith aptly entitled his beautifully-written book – a must for anyone who wants to know more about the country before visiting it) with our own eyes. If anything, for us it ought to be the Land of Fraternity, for China has supplanted Russia as the main economic benefactor of the nation, ever since the latter stopped its previously generous, crucial aid in the nineties, precipitating the long and bitter ‘special period’. We would again, I thought, stand out among the throngs of Western tourists, as always in the developing countries frequented by more adventurous travellers. But would we be hustled everywhere with non-stop ‘Ni-Hao-Konichiwas’, which inevitably taints one’s memories of even the most beautiful cities? Would we, even worse, be stared at everywhere by the vulture-eyes of expressionless locals who simply regarded us as strange novelties (growing up in China, I always thought this a privilege of the blue-eyed ‘foreigners’, until I inadvertently became one myself, in Burma, in the Middle East, in more remote corners of the US, even)? The only way to find out, of course, is to be there, to go everywhere, to experience – but first of all, to arrive.

Alternative Olivier Awards 2009! - a preview

I had the incomparable fortune to sit on the Olivier Awards panel in 2008, which made the whole year of theatre-going experience all the more special. Because they wouldn't take on the same people as lay panellists (which was what I was) in consecutive years, 2009 was a judging-duty-free year in the theatre. However, as I was astounded to have the total number of productions we'll have been to see by the year-end counted by my dutiful partner (sixty-one - including all plays and musicals; eighty-one if you include opera and dance), I thought that perhaps I was adequately qualified to put together an awards list after all. Alas this one will have to depend entirely on my personal taste (eclectic enough, I believe) and judgement (wise enough, I hope). Here we go:-

Best new play

When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell
We've had a good year of Bovell plays in London: Toby Frow's new production of Speaking in Tongues shed new light on this earlier work, albeit with an uneven cast; and the European premiere of this stunning new piece, a characteristically multi-layered entangled plot spanning four generations and across two far-apart continents, was a resounding confirmation. Of how a dramatist at the height of his power can judge the narrative and psychological tensions with rare precision, distilling the word 'thriller' with a new, deeper meaning. Also, of the scale of accomplishment by Michael Attenborough in his Artistic Director role at Almeida, one of the independent powerhouses of London theatre. The ensemble cast boast no mega stars yet were uniformly outstanding. The night I was there, Keira Knightley and Rupert Friend were sitting a few rows behind us – now that we know they're both appearing in the West End, it would seem that they were wisely learning from the real pros. It was also one of the very few occasions this year that I was moved to uncontrollable sobs, at any arts event.

Honourable mention: Enron, Lucy Prebble (Royal Court Downstairs); Cock, Mike Bartlett (Royal Court Upstairs)
So much has been said about Enron, all I'd like to add is GO to see it in the West End, if you missed the Royal Court run. It will probably fit the bigger stage a bit better too. I was so pleased we booked for Cock very early on, as it became one of the highlights of the entire year, and because the bare, cock-pit set design (maximum seating: about 60) befit the text so perfectly, it'd be hard to imagine it being transferred to any West-End venue (or anywhere else, for that matter). Here's my 150-word review of it for the Olivier Award panel application:

Mike Barlett's provocatively titled, ninety-minute-long 'Cock', is a compelling piece of work. The series of tableaux portray an emotionally (and sexually – but that's the lesser concern here) confused young urbanite (John, the only named character) oscillating between his long-term male lover (M) and a loving, quietly tenacious female encounter (W), driving everyone involved – including the spectators – into sheer agony with his indecision along the way. If this equivocation sounds like the behaviour of a modern, metrosexual Hamlet, the denouement, a scene of 'the ultimate bitch fight' (as M puts it bitterly) with the threesome plus M's father around dinner table, evokes Ayckbourn at his best. Yet Bartlett shows great promise as an acute observer of contemporary conundrums of the heart, and demonstrates a distinctive style with his spit-fire dialogue in all the two-hander scenes, often delivering piercing poignancy and a great joke in one stroke. Ben Wishaw, as John, leads the superlative cast.


Best musical production
A Little Night Music, Menier Chocolate Factory
It was a shame that the subsequent WE transfer of this superbly elegant revival by Trevor Nunn wasn't much of a hit. Without a superstar billing it really struggled in competing with the likes of Jude Law in Hamlet and Helen Mirren in Phedre, both big summer audience draws. I didn't see it again (at Garrick), nor was I surprised to read about the mostly lukewarm reviews of Catherine Zeta-Jones's return to stage as Desiree in the Broadway transfer a few days ago. The original cast, on the living-room-sized MCF stage, conveyed much more emotional nuance than is usually expected from a musical, even one by Sondheim. The singing was exemplary, the simple design imbued with charm.


Best director
James MacDonald, for Judgement Day (Almeida) and Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
We've had an exceptional year of London theatre, and yet these two stood out as the most perfect productions of the year for me. The fact that they came from the same director speaks volumes, and yet they couldn't have been more different in idiom and execution. The Horvath revival featured a hugely imaginative and effective use of the Almeida space with its design, which befits the 1930s play about moral responsibilities in its historic details, while also distilling it with a compelling, poetic modernity. Cock, on the other hand, would probably seem on paper like a real headache for many a less able director, with its writer specifying the lack of any set or props. Yet MacDonald achieves that most important task missed (or dismissed, in some cases?) by many directors – he makes us care about the characters, through their primal human behaviours and reactions. The rest is built by our imagination, easily.

Honourable mention: Rupert Goold, for Time and the Conways (Lyttleton, National) and Enron (Royal Court Downstairs)

Enron was the big theatrical event of the year in publicity terms (deservingly so, I hasten to add), but Goold's JB Priestley revival was a revelation of how powerful this 'time play'can still be. With its narrative structure, daringly ahead of its time, and the perpetually familiar setting of a dysfunctional family, the work also features themes of class, mortality, the impact of war, the power of money and the futility of kindness. Phew, quite a heavy-going recipe, you say. Yet above all, what Goold gives us is a poignantly human story, and to me the opinion-splitting multi-media choreography sequences lift the text to a powerfully charged emotional height.

Best actor
Kevin Spacey, Inherit the Wind (Old Vic)
Most pundits have hailed Mark Rylance's turn in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem as the performance of the year. I beg to differ. Spacey's artistic direction at the Old Vic finally got onto the right track last year, and seems, for the moment, to be going from strength to strength. He's a Big Performer on stage in the same sense as Rylance – powerful deliveries of lines, big physical gestures, sweeping emotions running the whole human gamut. If some of the dramatic movements appear to manoeuvre our emotions, they're there for a reason. Spacey's compelling Darwinian lawyer edges out for me over Rylance's West-country misanthrope, perhaps because so often do powerful plays impress with cool intellectuality stirred and shaken with cynicism, that when a good old fashioned debate (courtroom scene, no less!) fills you with warmth and hopefulness for mankind, it stays in the memory just a little bit longer.

Honourable mention: Ben Whishaw, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
I've added it to my Santa's wish list for this year that we see more of Whishaw on London stage before his schedule becomes inevitably monopolised by Hollywood blockbusters and the occasional arthouse films (New Yorkers who're reading this: get a ticket to his turn in 'The Pride' before it sells out NOW – another new play courtesy of Royal Court, this was the winner of the 2008 Olivier Award for an Affiliate Theatre that my fellow panellists and I voted for). It's not everyday that you have a truly dashing leading man who effortlessly exudes indelible charisma as well as piercing intelligence, and when the performer in question is not yet thirty, you know there's a wonderful career ahead waiting to unfold spectacularly.

Best actress
Rachel Weisz, A Streetcar Named Desire (Donmar Warehouse)
I wrote in my pre-review of Streetcar, back in July, that Weisz was excellent in this role but was far too beautiful and youthful for what we expect Blanche Dubois to be. This was echoed by a number of broadsheet critics, and Weisz herself pointed out – rightly – that Williams's text had specified Blanche as being a woman of thirty, a full eight years short of her own actual age. This, if nothing else, is illuminating on how Western society’s perception of youth has changed in the last century. And when I look back on the leading ladies of the year, Weisz's performance still stands out for the integrity and conviction with which she inhabited this well-known character.

Honourable mention: Juliet Stevenson, Duet for One (Almeida)
A superbly understated study of the helplessness of a superb mind, gradually and irreversibly being deprived of the body attached to it. We're accustomed to having such eternally fighting characters on stage now as well as surrounding us in real life. But once in a while an exceptional thespian shows us that the familiar story can be seen through different angles, with a kind of immobile viscerality we hitherto didn't know existed, and that's the case in point here.

Best performance in a supporting role
Bertie Carvel, Rope (Almeida)
Carvel impressed me in the aforementioned Royal Court production of The Pride last year (and as leading man in the new musical 'Parade' before that!), so I'd been looking forward to his latest role, in this Hitchcock adaptation. So much so that I nearly missed his entrance, because the handsome young man I remembered was unrecognisable as the cynical war veteran, so convincingly does he embody the role completely. Now that he's proved himself to be a real chameleon, I think he could become one of the great character actors of his generation. Surely being blessed with good looks doesn't hurt.

Honourable mention: Katherine Parkinson, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs; Rebecca Hall, Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic)
Parkinson, along with Ben Whishaw, talks us through a highly charged and deeply confused sex scene (her partner here being a gay man discovering the female species for the first time, literally) with no more physical movement than slowly circling the tiny stage in centrifugal steps. And it's one of the most sensual moments I've ever experienced on any stage. Her diffident, gentle yet steely character is no less complex than others in the play, but is the one who wins our heart. She can do the understated comical too, which is a rare gift.
Hall was memorable in both plays that constituted the inaugural Bridge Project in the summer. It takes a real actress to tackle both Chekov and Shakespeare – her characters effectively divided by twenty years in age – concurrently, with aplomb. As with Wishaw, I sincerely hope her commitment to the stage shall remain for a while, and I can see her maturing into Arkadinda one day already, via Nora and many more Shakespearean heroines along the way.


Best new choreography
Russell Maliphant, AfterLight
One quarter of an evening of world premieres created to the brief 'In the Spirit of Diaghilev', Maliphant's short, mesmerising male solo is deceptively simple by description: a theme and variations of the dancer (Daniel Proietto, ethereally beautiful) spiralling in semi-light. It succeeds, in breathtaking fashion, in what the choreographer set out to do: to capture the essence of Nijinsky the dancer.

Hail, the Civilised Commute

Well I'd never envisaged these two words appearing in the same sentence - until our blisfully stress-free journey home tonight, after the two-hour-long first half of Mother Courage. (I may be a theatre fanatic but I never waver in deciding to walk out of things, which actually happens a few times a year.) Walking across Hungerford Bridge in anticipation of our usual District/Circle line - DLR journey home, shivering a bit in the newly plummeted temperature, we catch sight of a Thames Clipper drawing near Embankment Pier. I have used the service a couple of times before but always for touristy purposes - specifically, taking visiting friends on a boatride from the Savoy Pier (an easy walk from work) to Canary Wharf, followed by dinner at home. M reminds me that Oyster cards are now valid for discounted journeys on the boat. An unspoken collective decision is made in half a second, as we accelerate our steps descending the bridge. The smiling, laid-back pier staff confirm that the boat is indeed about to depart for the East, and within seconds we are seated in the warm, cavernous cabin, watching the pier recede.

There's really nothing more civilised than taking a boat trip down the Thames at ten o'clock on a winter evening. The early Christmas lights already seem a bit more plentiful on the Southbank than usual, offsetting the slightly more distant, yet no less imposing sight of the Parliament nicely. The water is calm, and the brief stops at each pier along the way - only if there's anyone alighting or waiting to board - so smooth, that the harsh chill and wind that we enountered a few minutes ago already seem like a strange urban myth. The National that we just stepped out of, Oxo Tower, Design Museum, HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge - all the familiar landmarks that we choose to sweep under the 'sights for tourists' category on overground journeys anytime of the day, now seem to disclose themselves in a tantalising new dimension. I'm sure the gently irregular, undulating rhythm in which we're travelling has something to do with it. All around us, the dozen or so fellow passengers are either solo commuters (some people caught this boat a lot earlier than we did - metaphorically of course) buried in their books or Blackberries (for you can actually do all the virtual business here if you want, unlike on the Tube), or couples exchanging muted conversations. This naturally serene, almost poetic setting discourages high volume of any sort by default.

Before we know it, the glowing Canary Wharf towers are upon us. We disembark the boat with a cheery wave to the boat staff (even the people working on the river are so much nicer than their underground colleagues), commencing the short walk home. At just over a pound more than the regular Tube journey would have cost, this was worth every penny. We resolve to ascertain the timetable of the Thame Clipper service in the post-theatre hours, and I suspect we'll soon become regulars on the boat. Post-culture journey home had never felt so perfectly civilised.