Will Waspe
At the climax of a horrible little trendy play by Stanley Eveling called Shivvers, at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, an actor committing a sort of hara-kiri gushes blood from the stomach. The director of the piece, one Max Stafford-Clarke — who must surely* know a good psychiatrist — is reported to be hurt that reviewers should have spoken of 'ketchup' and 'red paint', failing to recognise the stuff as real blood.
"Their ready assumption that it was artificial," said Stafford-Clark, and I give you my word I am not quoting from the Peter Simple column, "says something about the nature of reality."
What it says, of course, is something about the civilised nature of drama reviewers and their ready assumption that it is shared by theatrical directors.
Not his to sell
Most of the works in that dizzyingly commercial art show, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, are naturally for sale — and most of the artists' prayers in that regard are, I gather, being answered.
There is one poor fellow, alas, who has no expectations from the bonanza. Terence Bennett, after submitting about eighteen pictures to the Academy over the course of the last six years, finally had a painting accepted of an industrial landscape near Doncaster — and it cannot be sold. What happened is that Bennett was appointed -last October a Yorkshire Television Fine Art Fellow, with a commission to paint exclusively, for the TV corn pany in its transmission area. He did his accepted picture on Yorkshire TV time and, under the terms of his appointment, they own it and are sticking to it.
No story
Some of the most intriguingly piquant stories that come the way of gossip columnists cannot, the reader will realise, be printed, and those of us who would retail them just have to sigh and live with the spoil-sport libel laws. The really foolish thing is to print such a story after even the hints have been stripped out of it by nervous lawyers. This, I suspect, is the story behind the story in Allan Hall's 'Atticus' column in last Sunday's Sunday Times in which he tried so desperately to communicate to us who it is that the literary world thinks the scandalous heroine of Rachel Billington's new novel, Beautiful, is based upon. But he didn't make it, did he? It is Waspe's guess that only those who knew already would know what he was on about. To everyone else it must have seemed a very mysterious item indeed.
Two stones
Granada Television have put out a publicity story about this Sunday's Childhood episode in which they blissfully quote the star actor, Anthony Hopkins, as saying that he "walked out" of the National Theatre company after a dispute with Michael Blakemore over something Hopkins thought was funny and Blakemore didn't. That is rather at odds with the yarn the National Theatre put out about his being over-tired — which was curious, as I said at the time, since he began work on a film almost immediately.
But hatchets are evidently buried now, anyway, for Hopkins — as I've also already reported — is being eased back into the company via their New York production of Equus.
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