Will Waspe
Friends of playwright Rodney Ackland were surprised to read in the Times Diary a week or two ago that he had gone off to "darkest Africa to preach his version of God to the natives," an unlikely activity for a man they'd always known as an agnostic. Not only unlikely, as it turned out, but wholly untrue. The bewildered Ackland — clearly the victim of some weird practical joke ostensibly played on the Diary's Michael Leapman — has never set foot in Africa and has no foreseeable intention of doing so, certainly not in any sort of Billy Graham capacity. It seems especially odd that Leapman — who presumably claims the item as his own, there being no credit to any of the `PHS' underlings — did not get the true facts from the Mr Ben Levin who was referred to as the playwright's "companion and secretary."
Bluff called
Those contentiously money-grubbing stage hands at the London Coliseum — the wellheeled elite of their trade — have been up to their disruptive games again, putting in a demand for £600 a man for getting out the scenery of the Royal Ballet at the end of scheduled season at the Coliseum in June. This is a matter of £40 per man per hour for fifteen hours' work, and is no less than five times the general West End figure for this well-established stagehands"perk'.
The NATTKE chaps at the Coliseum fell about laughing when Mr John Tooley, the Royal Opera House administrator, offered them £16 per hour — after all, they'd just picked up £100 apiece for three hours' getting out' work for the departing Canadian Ballet — who had other dates to meet and had no time to stand about haggling. Mr Tooley, however, was not going to be held to ransom: he treated the union's compromise offer to do the job for £450 a man with the same scorn they had lavished on his own top terms. Deadlock. So the Royal Ballet called off the season to look elsewhere.
Where Mr Tooley was shrewd was in getting down to the details of the pay-off well in advance of the season, or he might have found himself over the same barrel as the Canadians. The Festival Ballet, at present at the Coliseum, were not so farsighted — they're still waiting, at the time of writing, to know what their 'getting out' bill from the lads is going to be.
Back to normal
Sharp-eyed viewers of the wartime film, Night Train from Munich, on BBC-TV, might have spotted Irene Handl in the small part of a German station porter. Her memory of doing the accent may account, I suspect, for her giving Lady Bracknell such a strongly Germanic flavour in the current production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Greenwich. It was, I-gather, her own idea and not, as widely supposed, the result of some inscrutable theorising by the great Dr Jonathan Miller. He liked it hugely, of course, but after all tAe critical ribbing it was thought best to abandon it, and Miss Handl is now playing the role straight.
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