Will Waspe
Conspicuously absent from the celebrations as The Mousetrap reaches its twenty-first birthday this weekend will be Peter Cotes. the man who directed the Agatha Christie piece back in 1952 and set it on the road to its marathon run. Impresario Peter Saunders took Cotes's name off the bills years ago, and seems never really to have forgiven the director for declining his offer of a lump sum payment in place of his run-ofthe-play percentage once it became clear that the play was going to run a very long time indeed.
.Royal opera
Lord Harewood's Sadler's Wells Opera made an unusual choice of programme for the Coliseum on Princess Anne's wedding day last week: The Coronation of Poppea which, of all operas, is the one least respectful to royalty and royal love, being mostly concerned with regal lechery and miscellaneous unseemliness. Lord Harewood cannot, perhaps, be blamed for failing to notice the remarkably unsuitable juxtaposition of The Coronation and The Wedding, for he was pointedly not invited to the latter.
Oh, .Linda
My art critic colleague Evan Anthony, whose Covent Garden Gallery has achieved a quiet little scoop in staging Dan Snyder's first London exhibition, felt that the scoop should be kept a little less quiet and tells me he rang Linda Blandford of the Observer's Pendennis column to see whether she might be interested in talking to Snyder when he flew in from California last week. She was not. An artist would have to have done something pretty startling besides just painting, it seemed, to be worth mentioning on her page. "Such as that he shot his mother-in-law," said Anthony fliply. already dubious about his venture into philistine territory. Pause. " Really?" said Miss Blandford. "Well, that sounds interesting. Have him call me tomorrow.'
' Anthony says he toyed with the. idea of asking Snyder to go along with the lady's bizarre idea of what makes an artist worth mentioning, but eventually ethics got the better of his sense of humour. He has promised Linda, though, that if ever he does find an artist who has shot his mother-in-law. she will be the very first to know.
Previous page
