Will Waspe
The Observer's professorial theatre critic, Robert Brustein from Yale, has been carrysing on an extraordinary verbal battle with the National Theatre's Michael Blakemore over the latter's productions of the American plays, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Front Page. Though a clear points loser of every round, Brustein may derive some comfort from the fact that Blakemore will not be directing the TV version of the Long Day's Journey production, aimed at American audiences. He will, however, have to live with the fact that the job is going to another Englishman, Peter Wood, whose ideas about the play (and the accents that have so bugged the Yale man) are, I understand, a lot closer to Blakemore's than to Brustein's.
Don't call us ...
I was afflicted with a touch of the Brusteins myself this week, deserting the West End to investigate a place called The Howff, a
theatre café' in a reclaimed derelict building behind the Round House. The idea is agreeable in theory. In practice, I fear, it is thus far immensely disagreeable, due to the nuisance value of the one-hour show put on by a charmless outfit called the Incubus Theatre Company. My suggestion to the proprietor, ex-actor Roy Guest, is that he should audition his 'attractions ' first.
Flush in the pan
The company intending to screen Warhol was Sir Lew Grade's offend-nobody-pleaseeverybody ATV. The minions must have slipped it into the schedules while Sir Lew wasn't paying attention. I was glad to be reassured this week that commercial television's most shining knight has been busy signing up far less controversial people — John Mills for a Paul Gallico series, Kenneth More to play Chesterton's Father Brown.
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