Will Waspe's Whispers
London's Festival Ballet returns to town later this month (August 24) for a four-week season at the Royal Festival Hall, when we may confidently look to the William Hickey column for an indication of how the company are reconfreres in the world of garded by their ballet.
Tutu friendly
No fewer than three times in one week, during the Festival Ballet's last season at the Coliseum, the Daily Express columnist ran items provided by ' friends ' of the company — led by John Gilpin, who let it be known that he did not get on with the artistic director, Beryl Grey, and would only be dancing at the Festival Gala at his own insistence. (Gilpin, long the Festival's main attraction, has had two serious operations on his legs, and his performance could only be a token one, anyway.) Nevertheless, like a true trouper, Miss Grey managed to kiss him smilingly on-stage that night.
Then Belinda Wright complained to Hickey that she had not been asked to dance at the Gala. She could not understand why expensive guest stars had been asked when she would have danced for the price of a cab across town. Finally, Anton Dolin, one of the company's founders, weighed in with the news that he was thinking of founding a new company — one in which everyone would be happy. He hadn't enjoyed seeing what had happened to the Festival Ballet in the past two years.
With exceeding gall, Dolin turned up at the Coliseum the day after his little piece appeared, trying to knock up business for his mooted project. A member of the staff showed him the door. "My name is Anton Dolin and every theatre in London is open to me," he is said to have cried. But in fact his name is really Patrick Healey-Kay and on that day, at least, the Coliseum was closed.
The sequel to this one-sided war waged in the Hickey column was that some of the Festival Ballet's loyalists attempted to collect signatures on an expression of confidence in, and appreciation of, their artistic director.
Unfortunately the first to be asked — the stars, of course — refused. It would be nice to think that their refusal was solely on the reasonable grounds that such expressions of fidelity should not be necessary in the middle of so successful a season. It would also be unduly naive.
Begging bowls Penurious Roy Boulting, the well-known husband, bleats about the gradual ,cut-back in the Government's film financing. His argument — that British films earn foreign currency — might be taken up by those other patriotic entrepreneurs, the gaming casino proprietors who could also apply for state loans. With equal prospects of success.
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