Will Waspe
Sandersons, the decoration firm, have got more mileage than they can have dreamed of from featuring the National Theatre's director, Peter Hall, in their advertisements. The Sunday before last, the Observer ran a profile of him by Michael Davie which devoted its opening paragraph to the 'Very Peter Hall, very Sanderson' ad in the colour magazine, and went on to discuss the difficulty of preventing the new South Bank complex becoming 'very Peter Hall, very National Theatre!. That day, the first of Hall's Aquarius programmes went out on ITV screens and was reviewed in the London Evening Standard on Monday by Peter Forster, who began; 'Very Peter Hall, very Aquarius.' Last Sunday, again in the Observer, Clive James began his column, The new Aquarius is very Peter Hall, very Sanderson' and went on to work in a succession of droll asides
('very Peter Hall, very Sandringham', 'very Peter Hall, very Sanders of the River') in the same vein. I daresay other television reviewers had the same beguiling notion. And just wait till the National Theatre opens . . . And then there is this column. There is, however, no truth in the rumour that Sandersons are to market lifesize effigies of Peter Hall to go with their wallpapers.
Chaos
Playwright Peter Shaffer appears to have been very carefree, or very careless, about supervising the published texts of his play, Black Comedy, which is causing much confusion among companies performing it. When the players assembled, for example, for rehearsals of a revival of the play which opens next week at the Gardner Centre, Brighton, a fairly chaotic sessibil ensued due to the fact that some of them had French's Acting Edition, others had a hardback edition, and the director, John Fernald, was working from the copy he had used for an American production — and all three were different.
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