Last Ditch Culture

I've been spending my last weekend of the year squeezing in some more culture, trying to make sure I've not missed anything that I should have a 2012 opinion on.

First off: music and an album with a very orange cover, probably the most excited I've been about listening to an album this year; not Frank Ocean's Channel Orange (which seems to have swept the year end polls but which I don't get, which is probably a function of me getting old as much as anything else) but the new Beans on Toast album (which for some reason has been omitted not only from the year-end charts but also from any review section of any non-niche music publication).  Turns out it's about as good as an album has got this year, but this again may just be a function of me getting old and this not sounding like David Guetta / everything else.

This year's seen me going to the theatre a lot.  I've seen some really fun stuff (Three Sisters - who'd've thought?), some really boring stuff (Bingo) and loads of Shakespeare.  To maximise my Shakespeare exposure I saved the biggest 'til last (I'm taking the histrionic Americanised version of Mayan astronomy in my definition of "last" - tomorrow night my calendar runs out so it's the end of the world, right?). Mark Rylance! Stephen Fry! Trigger from Only Fools and Horses! All on stage together! Exclamation mark explosion of excitement!! I've not seen Twelfth Night before and it was well acted and funny and that but crikey the first half is boring. I appreciate that that Bard fella is handy with words but he can drag out the set-up of a comedy.

So Shakespearian highlight of the year (the Pete of ten years ago has just been sick in his mouth at how bourgeois the concept of "Shakespearian highlight of the year" sounds)?  Was it Mark Rylance in Richard III? Simon Russell Beale in Timon of Athens? No and no. Both were good but both get soundly beaten by the Globe to Globe, all-African Julius Caesar. Which in any other year yada yada... How good was Macbeth at the Clerkenwell House of Detention? It makes a pretty good case for the dropping of "Shakespearian" from that first sentence...