TheSpectator's Arts Round-up
THEATRE
Opening in London: The Last Sweet Days of Isaac, the American rock musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, brought to the Old Vic for a week by the company of the Theatre Royal, York, September 6-11; Skyvers, Barry Reckford's play, lately at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, moves to the Roundhouse for a season from September 8.
Stratford-upon-Avon: Othello, the latest Royal Shakespeare Company production with Brewster Mason as the Moor, Emrys James as Iago, Lisa Harrow as Desdemona, joins the repertory on September 9.
Worth seeing in London: Hamlet, with Ian McKellen (Cambridge); Enemies, the Royal Shakespeare Company's re-discovery of a Maxim Gorki play, which is like Galsworthy re-written by Chekhov (Aldwych, in repertory); Butte)), 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, with Margaret Tyzack and Judy Parfitt (Piccadilly); West of Suez, the latest John Osborne play (Royal Court).
CINEMA
Pick of the London runners: Sunday, Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger's brilliant treatment of a contemporary 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 (Leicester Square Theatre); Dearest Love, Louis Malle's sensitive statement of the case for incest in a boy's upbringing (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).
BALLET
The Little Angels, the National Folk Ballet of Korea, make their first appearance here in a one-week season at Sadler's Wells, September 6-11.
The London Festival Ballet continues at the Royal Festival Hall where the programme all next weck (September 6-11) is The Sleeping Beauty.
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