W ill
Waspe
Mr Harold Lever, the recently-appointed overlord of the arts, is finding it a hard task to reach a decision as to who should succeed the preposterous Hugh Jenkins as Arts Minister.
George Strauss, the Father of the House of Commons, would be welcomed as a splendid choice, but the Prime Minister considers him too old for the job. Lord Strabolgi, the Government spokesman on the Arts in the Lords, is also well qualified, but a member of the Upper House is hardly likely to go down well with the Marxists.
Maurice Edelman is regarded as unsuitable because he is too smooth for Mr Wilson's liking, while Bryan Magee is a bit too flash for that of Mr Lever. Guy Barnett, the worthy member for Greenwich and a trustee of the National Maritime Museum, is rather too pelitically conformist to make a genuinely effective Arts Minister. On the other hand, Mrs Renee Short is of course as Marxist as Mr Jenkins himself, as well as being something of a music hall turn.
All of which leaves as Mr Lever's.. obvious candidate the actor MP Andrew Faulds, who has been described by Norman St John-Stevas as "the best arts minister we never had". But I would add "nor ever will have", for Mr Wilson will never be able to overlook Fauld's outspoken social-democratic stance.
On the South Bank
Peter Hall looked quite blissfully happy when he gathered the press about him this week to announce yet another, and conceivably final, opening date for the National Theatre — or at least for one of its three auditoria, the Lyttleton, where the company will move from the Old Vic next March.
Alas, I could not entirely share Hall's euphoria in some subsidiary matters. One was the way in which he spoke of bringing life to the South Bank — his own street theatre plans seemed the least of the future he envisaged — as though he were supremo for all Southwark, rather than simply a theatre.
Another was that the indication that my fears of a surreptitious 'merger' of the National, the Royal Shakespeare and the Royal Court Theatres are not without foundation. Hall spoke blithely of perhaps accommodating the RSC if they should lose their base at the Aldwych; and the new play he announced for the Lyttleton is Howard Brenton's Weapons of Happiness, to be directed by David Hare, two young lads closely associated hitherto with the Royal Court.
And yet a third is the current wasteful expenditure in refurbishing the frontage of the Old Vic, work unlikely to be completed in less than three months by subsidised tenants who are planning to vacate it in five months' time.
Dealer's farce
There is nothing I enjoy more than a first-class shouting match particularly in the rarified atmosphere of the art trade. Last week I was privileged to witness at first hand just such a spectacle at Quaglino's when the London Society of Art Dealers held a very secret meeting to discuss the 10 per cent buyers premium imposed by those avaricious auctioneers, Christies and Sothebys. In a performance of knock-about farce that Brian Rix might have envied the Bond Street boys decided to pursue in every possible way and with utmost vigour their campaign against the auctioneers — always provided, of course, that it did not in any way affect their own well-lined pockets.
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