The Spectator's Arts Round-up
THEATRE
Opening in London: John Osborne's new play, West of Suez, with Ralph Richardson and Jill Bennett in the cast, at the Royal Court, July 17. Worth seeing in London: Ian McKellen's Hamlet, reviewed this week (Cambridge); Alec Guinness in John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father, reviewed next week (Haymarket); Butley, Simon Gray's sardonic comedy of a bad day In the life of a homosexual university lecturer (Criterion); Kean, a fictionalized treatment of the eighteenth-century actor, by Jean-Paul Sartre (after Dumas), with a dazzling performance by Alan Badel (Globe); Forget-Me-Not Lane, a Peter Nichols comedy about a crumbling marriage (Apollo); Vivat! Vivat Regina! Robert Bolt on the rivalry of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, who are now being played by Margaret Tyzack and Judy Parfitt (Piccadilly); and for fun, Look, No Hands! with masterly comic performance by Harry Towb (Fortune) and Move Over Mrs Markham, a farce of which Feydeau would not have been ashamed (Vaudeville).
CINEMA
Pick of the London runners: Sunday, Bloody Sunday, a triangular affair (man, boy and girl, with, in the fashion of our day, the boy in the middle), starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head, and brilliantly directed by John Schlesinger (Leicester Square Theatre); Claire's Knee, a French film by Eric Rohmer, with Jean Claude Brialy playing a diplomat involved in flirtatious games on the shores of Lake Geneva and ultimately fixated on a young girl's patella (Curzon); a couple of funny American comedies, Diary of a Mad Housewife (Plaza) and Summer of '42 (Warner West End); Vanishing Point, with Barry Newman as a man pitted against the law and the landscape, driving from Denver to San francisco in fifteen hours (Odeon, Leicester Square).
EXHIBITIONS
Covent Garden: 25 Years of Opera and Ballet, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (August 19-October 10), designed by Alan Tagg, illustrating the postwar progress of the Royal Opera House, with sets, models, costumes, music tapes (Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Joan Sutherland, Geraint Evans in their great roles) and ballet film sequences. Scoop, Scandal and Strife, a Welsh Arts Council exhibition, due in London in December but presently at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (until September 12), looking at history through the medium of press photography from its inception in 1880—in the New York Daily Graphic—it its present-day rivalry with television.
SON ET LUMIERE
With a script by Robert Gittings, the Son et Lumiere presentation in St Paul's Cathedral, revived this summer for a second time, is concerned with the history of the cathedral from its building by Wren to the present day; voices heard include those of Alec Guinness (as Wren), Ralph Richardson and John Neville; the performances during August (every evening except Sundays and Mondays) begin at 9 pm.
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