The Review of the Year 2010

Oh, what a year it was! I don't think I will ever again have such a packed cultural year, sometimes an event a day. It's been a true pleasure and here are my best of the best:

Venue of the year must be the Barbican. Not every production there is great, but their generous schemes allow to broaden the mind with international theatre and abundance of classical music. And of course, I love the architecture with its mixture of ancient and brutalist.

I must agree with most critics that the National and the Royal Court had superb year with nearly every production on top form and I was lucky enough to catch most of them. Just a few to mention – London Assurance was the funniest play I have ever seen, Laura Wade's Posh explained the roots of the current political establishment, Clybourne Park talked about race like no one before.

The discovery of the year belongs to the National Gallery for it's guided tours – can't get enough of them.

War Horse and Secret Cinema disappointed the most. Secret Cinema is such a great idea, but they outgrew themselves and became a massive disorganised money spinning machine. The puppets at the War Horse were impressive, but the story and everything else is as ordinary as anything in the West End.

In the art galleries I most enjoyed the splendid Treasures from Budapest at the Royal Academy of Arts and Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde at the Tate Modern. While I visited my friend Sima in Rome in February, we saw a fantastic retrospective of Caravaggio's work. When she came over to London, we both loved something a bit more modern – a survey of designer Ron Arad's work at the Barbican. 

My books of the year are Ian McEwan's Amsterdam and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. One Day by Davis Nicholls was charming and funny and sad – a guilty pleasure. 

Week 38

As the festive period is in full swing, not much time left for culture when you have all those parties to attend. Nevertheless, I found some time in my packed diary for the brilliant Les Parents Terribles at the Trafalgar Studios, part of Donmar's West End season. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much. The main lead acted by Francis Barber was fantastic. Barber’s Yvonne is a Parisian bourgeois mother with Oedipal syndrome - her son Mikey is her life. However, he is 22, falls in love and is ready to leave the gypsy caravan, as their home is known. The twist is that father, a failed scientist, had an affair with the same girl. All the secrets and scheming is conducted by Yvonne’s sister, whose precision and love for order contrasts with the mess in everyday life of this family. The playwright Jean Cocteau created Les Parents Terribles in 1938 and borrowed many devices from Chekhov and Molière. Originally the play caused an outrage and even in this modern production the family looks sinful.

Another week, another prize winner book. This week I read Anita Brookner's 1984 Booker prize winner Hotel du Lac. A lyric little story how a woman in her late thirties escapes London to a sleepy Swiss resort and solves her unimportant problems. I appreciated Brookner’s style, but there was so little action and I couldn’t feel sorry for any of the upper middle class characters. Thinking about it, out of all Booker prize winners I read, only a few were great. Mostly the winners are quite mediocre… but maybe it’s just my taste.

Week 37

The winner of the Nobel Literature prize for 2009 is Herta Müller and last week I read one of her books. I never heard of her and the Nobel prize is great to publicise unknown yet brilliant writers. Müller was born in Romania, but spent most of her life in Germany. Even so, her books mostly portrait the grim reality of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime. The Appointment is not an exception. The book concentrates on a young woman's day while she travels to her appointment with secret police. She was summoned because of sewing notes into the pockets of suits bound for Italy asking recipients to marry her so she could escape the country. The narrative flashes back to her earlier life and little by little we found out about her family, two marriages and friendships. Müller writes like a spider mites its web – unseamlessly the action moves from now and here to the past and memories. The book is a good illustration of people's capability to live with a mad regime. 

After the Royal Festival Hall reopened to the public after £111m refurbishment in 2007 I saw Carmen in there, but it was so long ago and I sat so high up with the gods, I forgot how beautiful it is inside. The hall is very spacious and decorated in white, which looks quite minimalistic and clean. The side walls are covered with wavy balconies which to my eyes are the most elegant circle in London theatres and halls. Thanks to the interior of the hall I had something to concentrate on, as the concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra was rather boring. A safe choice of Schuman's symphony left the public unmoved, although it as very impressive how the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi lead the orchestra without notes – he had it all in his head.