The Spectator's Arts Round-up
ART
Hayward Gallery: the Bridget Riley retrospective will knock your eye out (or at least send you away with double vision); it contains work dating back twenty years, progressing from the early preoccupation with Seurat's techniques to the latest experiments with coloured stripes and dots. Queen's Gallery: Dutch old masters — over 100 of them — spruced up beautifully for the occasion and elegantly displayed. Victoria and Albert Museum : curiously little noted by the press, a satirical and malicious collection of caricatures, The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, has been on for months almost in secret — but the Guardian got around to reviewing it this week, so visitors may now be rather less of a Spectator club.
MUSIC
Pick of the Proms : Thea Musgrave, first woman composer to conduct a prom at the Royal Albert Hall, takes the baton in her own Horn Concerto, written for soloist Barry Tuckwell, August 9; the Scottish Opera and Scottish National Orchestra under Alexander Gibson, with Ticho Parly and Helga Dernesch among the singers,. give Acts 1 and 3 of Siegfried in English, August 10; Joseph Suk, great-grandson of Dvorak, is the soloist in Beethoven's violin concerto in D major with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, August 11.
RADIO
First production in English of Menander's comedy, The Girl from Samos, in stereo, on Sunday, August 8 (Radio 3), which should demonstrate that not all ancient Greek comedy is in the belly-laugh style of Plautus (as currently transcribed in TV's Up Pompeii!). Professor Eric G. Turner of University College, who has translated the play, gives some background facts on the 1968 discovery of the tattered papyrus of works by Menander, in a talk (also on Radio 3) earlier the same night.
THEATRE
Worth seeing in London : Gorki's Enemies, which is like Galsworthy re-written by Chekhov (in repertory, August 6, 7, 9 and 10, Aldwych); Butley, with Alan Bates as a university don losing his grip and being deserted by his homosexual boyfriend as well as his wife (Criterion); Kean, with Alan Badel being magnificently flamboyant in a Dumas-Sartre fictionalization of the great actor's career (Globe); Forget-Me-Not Lane, one of Peter Nichols's wry comedies, this one about a man, played by Anton Rodgers, looking back ruefully on twenty years of his life (Apollo); Vivat! Vivat Regina!, the Elizabeth and Mary Stuart rivalry as seen by Robert Bolt (Piccadilly); Look, No Hands!, a Lesley Storm comedy worth seeing for Harry Towb's comic expertise as a distraught film producer (Fortune); Move Over lt/Irs Markham, a very funny farce (Vaudeville); The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton's play about an Oxbridge lecturer who has no luck at all in his personal relationships (May Fair). Coming off : The Lovers of Viorne, with Peggy Ashcroft's riveting study of the murderess in the Marguerite Duras play, closes August 7 (Royal Court); The Patrick Pearse Motel, Hugh Leonard's farce, closes August 21 (Queen's).
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