Will Waspe's Whispers
Participatory art has its snags — as the Tate Gallery found earlier this year when the Robert Morris exhibition was more or less wrecked by overenthusiastic participators. But it is not only the exhibits that are at risk. Quite a few Tate visitors suffered minor injuries at the Morris show — if nothing worse than sprains and bruises.
A small boy at Hyde Park's Serpentine Gallery last Sunday didn't get away so lightly. I'm told he spent twenty-four hours in hospital after an ambulance had carted him off, following his flying fall from the top of a vast boulder-shaped piece of inflatable sculpture which he had playfully scaled. The piece is part of the Arts Council's Blow Up 71 show, which has been touring the country for the last three months — accompanied, I'm glad to hear from the Council, by third party insurance cover. I wonder whether private exhibitors of participatory art are so provident? There seems a good case for a law making insurance cover obligatory.
Hint, hint
As you may have heard, Sadler's Wells Opera is soliciting suggestions for a new name, now that it is established at the Coliseum — far from the theatre whose name it still confusingly bears. When they first moved to the Coliseum the Wells people wanted to call themselves the National Opera, but there was little official enthusiam for that. It's the Royal Opera that is the darling of the Arts Council (which supports them both), and although the Covent Garden lot use too much foreign talent to claim to be 'National' themselves, they couldn't have been keen on the title being used elsewhere.
Now the Wells seeks decisive support. The slips in the Coliseum programmes asking for name suggestions are careful to point out as a guide to patrons' inventiveness that (1) only British singers are employed, (2) operas are performed only in English, (3) it's Britain's oldest opera company, and (4) it is seen throughout the country, giving a third of its performances on tour. You aren't surprised, are you, that the suggestion on most of the slips is 'The National Opera '?
Comparison invited
When a man has already cast himself as Macbeth, Borkman and Oedipus, it's hard for him to find anything else worthy of his attention, but I see that Sir Bernard Miles is now to play Iago — the longest part in Othello.
Say what you will of Miles, you can't
say he lacks nerve. He's opening his Othello at the Mermaid on September 16— just a week after the Royal Shakespeare Company has a crack at the play at Stratford.
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