Will Waspe's Whispers
I can't remember any foreign theatrical occasion that got such acres of British press space as Orghast, the work in progress ' of Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research, at the Shiraz Festival. How come all those solemn Pseud's Corner features about an event thousands of miles away that was presented in four different languages, none of intelligible to its audience?
In case you thought the financially hardpressed newspapers had gone out of their minds in dispatching their men to Persia to see it, I can reassure you about that, anyway. The Iran Government footed the bill for the junket. Naturally, when it became known that they would do so, the under-privileged drama reviewers — who, unlike film reviewers, get few opportunities to ride the publicity gravy-train — were off like migrating birds.
How did Brook, whose ICTR is Parisbased, come to be in Shiraz, anyway? Credit the Financial Times's Andrew Porter with setting the con in motion; it was he who suggested Persepolis to Brook and sold the Shiraz people on the idea. Of course, he then covered it for the FT. While he was out there, I hear, he got up another little show for his colleagues and their fellow hotel guests: a lounge version of Figaro, improvised by a troupe of actors from Teheran's brothel district.
Keeping it dark
My compliments to the Royal Shakespeare Company for pointedly not publicizing the fact that there is nudity in one of the three plays they're doing this autumn in a nineweek season at The Place, off Euston Road. I'll join the conspiracy of silence by not telling you which play.
I do wonder, though, whether the nudity is really artistically vital, as they claim. There's at least one actress — who nearly got a job with the RSC until she thought it ! over and modestly declined to strip — who doesn't think so. And I cannot help recalling that the full frontal' decreed for Barbara Ferris in Slag at the Royal Court recently was not considered vital (or missed) when Marty Cruickshank played the same role in an earlier production.
Whose views ?
There is none of the self-congratulatory fulsomeness usually associated with theatre souvenir books in the National Theatre's latest publication, A Pictorial Record, 1963-71. The capsule comments are critical, even spiky, e.g. Philoctetes: "3 cautionary example of how not to do Greek tragedy"; or A Bond Honoured: "unconvincingly adapted by John Osborne." But shouldn't such opinions be personalized — or are we to take it that they reflect the views of the entire NT Board, when they read exactly like Ken Tynan?
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