Will Waspe
I imagine a great many people must be wondering how LWT's awfully expensive and expensively awful The Death of Adolf Hitler, came to get such civil and even laudatory press notices — both before and after its screening on Sunday. It isn't as though the reviewers didn't have plenty of time to prepare their opinions: they were shown this 'prestige ' production, and treated to refreshments by LWT, on the previous Wednesday. Since television critics are notoriously tetchier and touchier than their fellows, I must be careful in my inferences. Indeed, I hardly dare guess that the refreshments must have been terribly good and terribly relaxing.
Good bet
What magic resides in the name of David Frost! The merest whisper that his Equity Enterprises was bidding for the Hemdale Group and that Frost would join its board was enough to bounce Hemdale shares about 50 points up in the market. This was a sweetly unexpected morale booster for shareholders who were dubious about whether the group's lavish expenditure on preChristmas advertising (packaging their film and stage shows) could possibly be recouped at the box offices. A similar dubiety prompts my own suspicion that it is not Hemdale's showbiz interests so much as its less publicised betting shops that attract Frost.
Options open
The opening of Bernard Delfont's New London Theatre has been celebrated with multiple pages of paid advertisementeditorial matter in the local papers, in one of which special attention was drawn to the theatre's advantages as a conference venue. It is also fully and thoughtfully equipped for cinema projection. Delfont insists that it is to remain a '
live' theatre, but if the opening play, Ustinov's The Unknown Soldier and His Wife, is no more successful than it was five years ago at Chichester, there may well be some hasty re-thinking.
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