Will Waspe
Readers intrigued by a reference in Rodney Milnes's opera notes last week, to the effeet.ithaty the 11 Earls of Harewood and Proghede‘i might be working CAA ,t)113,SM nario of a melodrama„ between them, may need some filling-in on what this is all about.
Let us then kb back a few weeks to the appearance of the Royal Ballet (from Lord Drogheda's Covent Garden) at the Coliseum—officially the home of Lord Harewood's Sadler's %Veils Opera. Everyone with access to print — that is to say,, critics and. or reviewers — felt that the Royal Ballet filled the Coliseum stage and auditorium as to the manner born; so much so that Lord Harewood suspected the whole thing was a put-up job, a kite-flying operation designed to muscle the ballet permanently into the territory he quite rightly regards as belonging to opera. And he has lost no opportunities at all of stating firmly and forthrightly that any designs the Royal Ballet may have on the Coliseum
will be opposed and confounded., '
Hawke and Ludo
The trivialisation of politic'aCir sues by television is as much the fault of the politicians' who appear on the box as of the' TV men who endeavour, usually successfully, to mould them to the-requirement of the medium. Australia's Robert Hawke, interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy on Midweek last week, showed that thwarting the interviewer can provide just as lively entertainment as going along with him. Hawke bravely declined to give brisk, simple answers to complex questions, and got Kennedy in quite a state by observing that he had only agreed to appear in order to talk about the Aussie attitude to the nuclear tests — the topic, apparently, that Midweek was most anxious to avoid. A pity it had to happen to the discomfited Ludo (the least culpable of the trivialisers), and it was tactful of Hawke not to press his advantage over an interviewer so pitifully over a barrel.
Conflict of interests
A stormy time seems to be brewing in Actors' Equity. Though the Left-wing militants have been defeated right down the line in the elections for the Council, they were sufficiently well represented at the AGM last weekend to carry a motion calling for a merger with the film and TV technicians' unions — negotiations into which the Council will be bound to enter, even though, individually, nearly all of them opposed the idea.
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