Wi ll W av e
Lord Goodman, when not occupied with his legal commitments. his financial deals and the multifariously ' fix-it ' activities to which the state is pleased to call him, is a frequent visitor, I hear, to La Villa Blanche above Menwhere Graham Sutherland is at work on his portrait. Being chosen to enter the select company of Maugham, Beaverbrook and Churchill is said to have given the Blessed Arnold more pleasure than anything since his. peerage,
Critical operation
This is a week in which an unusual number of critics submit themselves to public judgement. In the theatre, the Times's drama critic, Irving Wardle, has his first play, The Houseboy, staged at the Open Space, and Punch critic Jeremy Kingston's Signs of the Times begins previews at the Vaudeville. Meanwhile, six leading art critics — Nigel Gosling (Observer), Paul Overy (Times), John Russell (Sunday Times), Michael Shepherd (Sunday Telegraph), Marina Vaizey (Financial Times) and Max Wykes-Joyce (International Herald-Tribune) — have each selected an artist to take part in the Critical Discoveries exhibition at the Covent Garden Gallery. Waspe will charitably not say which of them seems to have mistaken the gallery for Pseuds Corner.
Viet Nile
I am uneasy about how Shakesperians, who have so much welcomed the Bankside Globe project, are ultimately going to react to the way the Bard's works are treated at Mr Wanamaker's theatre. Last year's inaugural season featured a version of Hamlet set in a mpdern police state. This year, with confirmation that Vanessa Redgrave is indeed to appear under her exhusband's direction in Antony and Cleopatra, comes the news • that the play — doubtless in deference to Miss Redgrave's sensibilities — " is being linked with the American military and involves an Egyptian brothel."
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