Will Waspe
After the great Turner bonanza, which ended on Sunday after close on half a million admissions had been counted during the run at the Royal Academy, I heard it widely asked why the Academy was not to be the scene of the next big British. art bicentenary show, the Constable exhibition next year. That, as I daresay you know, will be at the Tate — a less suitable venue in the view of most.
Alas, the Academy could not have both. To stage the Turner they needed 130 paintings from the Tate, and the canny trustees of IVIillbank, knowing they had the RA over a barrel, offered a deal. To wit, in effect: "We'll lend you our Turners, if you give us a clear run for the Constable show."
So now you know how these. little commercial problems are worked out in the rarefied world of high culture and the public interest.
Footing the bill
The National Theatre has evidently not quite encountered those hard times that are just around the corner. Peter Hall, desirous of getting just the right effect for John Gabriel Borkman's pacing the floor in the first act of Ibsen's play, commissioned the construction of a special pair of shoes for Sir Ralph Richardson at the modest cost of £50. The heels were then hollowed out and fitted with transistorised electronic equipment that would amplify the tread to sensational effect. Cost: an extra E150. A pea in the bucket, of course, by the standards of South Bank largesse, but I hear the Arts Council are thinking of docking the sum from Hall's first salary cheque from London Weekend Television.
PS: Sir Ralph refused to wear the damned shoes.
Over-stretched
Jane Glover, eminence noire of Oxford music and Research Fellow of St Hugh's College, is basking in the critical acclaim accorded her edition of Monteverdi's Orfeo, recently staged by the University Opera Club. Who can complain? Only, perhaps, her pupils, who have been getting the sharp end of her tired tongue and the short end of her hired time — only twenty minutes weekly, though the allroundest Miss Glover draws pay for the full hour,
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