Will Waspe
In my fervour to see good in everything, I may just possibly have been wrong last week in attributing those laudatory remarks about Antony and Cleopatra in the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary to pure love of Vanessa Redgrave and Bankside.
I had somehow missed a previous and far from laudatory Item about the same theatre in July, which followed, I understand, the ejection of one of the Diary's leg-men from the auditorium for obstreperous insobriety. The fact that he wound up in the gutter outside may not have been unconnected with the peevish story that subsequently appeared; and the fact that the theatre's solicitors took grave exception to that paragraph may not have been entirely unconnected with the subsequent 'puffs.'
Snakes alive—sometimes
Before we leave Antony and Cleopatra and the Bankside Globe season (which closed prematurely when the bank holiday storm wrecked the marquee), a further word about that grass snake which played the part of the fatal asp. Or, rather, the several grass snakes.
There were, I hear, five of them in all. Two of them died from the strain of it all. Three were released by members of the stage staff who didn't like to see them in captivity (presumably they're still at large on Bankside). And since they were costing £25 apiece, Vanessa had to settle for a rubber one for the last few performances.
Equal wrongs
I am glad that it is now possible, in the cinema at least, to call a spade, as it were, a spade. Not so long ago, race was such a touchy subject that the employment of a coloured actor in other than a virtuous role would have been condemned as an incitement to racial hatred. This is evidently no longer so, for it has gone entirely without remark that in the latest James Bond film, Live and Let Die, all the villains are black.
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