1 JANUARY 1965, Page 8

Nlaya Prekrasnaya Ledy

I see that My Fair Lady was performed in Moscow to enthusiastic audiences, but the Columbia Broadcasting System, which owns 70 per cent of this incandescent property, was not sb enthusiastic : as the Soviet authorities 'neither requested nor received permission to stage the show,' CBS will get no money. Some Western writers, of course, especially those who depict our society on the verge of moral or material collapse, do pick up rouble royalties in the USSR. But, alas, as a non-signatory of. the Copy- right Conventions, Moscow is now the biggest centre of literary piracy since eighteenth-century Dublin. Meanwhile, it's reported that the re- hearsals for the Moscow version of West Side Story are under way....