Will Waspe's Whispers
Andy Warhol got into town this week to catch the final rehearsals of his play, Pork (which opens at the Roundhouse with Oh! Calcutta! prices — £2.50 a seat — on Monday), but his producer has been around for some time, writing chatty, personalized letters to critics and columnists. He's a wellheeled American named Ira D. Gale, who used to run a Mayfair art gallery, and he confidently announces that Pork will transfer from the Chalk Farm engine-shed to the West End, though his blurbs suggest that the appropriate place for a London run is the sewers. For those familiar with the underground vernacular who probably imagined the show •to be about dead policemen, Gale makes it clear that it is just straight porn. His advertising matter cunningly aims at Mature Adults Only,' but blandly and blatantly recoils from the idea of such self-censorship by also offering ' special prices for students.'
Drama teacher Doreen Cannon (whose classes Warren Mitchell devotedly attended long after he became a TV ' name ' as Alf Garnett) is described as 'Assistant to the Producer,' but describes herself as 'cast psychiatrist.' How could a reputable drama girl like her get involved with this sleazy project? "I finally persuaded myself there was merit in the play," she said after her expenses-paid trip to see it off-OffBroadway.
Doreen's reward for keeping the freaks from blowing their minds (and keeping a nervous Equity out of their hair) is a benefit preview performance on Sunday in aid of her own newly-formed 'Theatre 84.'
Mountain to Mahomet
How pleased Ken Russell must be that he has kept in with his friends at the Omnibus court. Their forty-five-minute advertisement on Sunday for his film The Devils might have seemed less squalidly fawning if, before scheduling it, they had waited to see whether it was a good picture. I wonder if they suspected all along that it wasn't, and decided to give their old mate the sort of BBC ' puff ' that money, so they say, can't buy — just to take the sting out of the lashes he was going to get from the film critics?
The Omnibus gang were so eager to let him publicise his picture that they didn't even trouble him to come down to the studio — they simply stuck the camera in his car and let him talk as he rode. The purpose of the operation was thinly wrapped up under the title Russell's Progress, but apart from a few shots from his early Elgar film at the start, and a few from his forthcoming The Boy Friend at the end, it was The Devils all the way — the fact that it was, then, still in production being the giveaway to Omnibus's friendly readiness to plug a pig In a poke.
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