Italy
FLOODS LAST Sunday night, the Apollo Society arranged an evening at the Haymarket in aid of the Italian Art and Archives Rescue Fund, which now stands .at some £120,000. Nearly all the theatre's knights and dames were there, some flitting on and off to do their famous turns, others reciting in a group arranged on upright chairs. This was a powerful stroke. Stolid, stern, broadshouldered, pondering each other's words with mighty hands on mighty knees and swathed in evening clothes, they looked like a gathering of recumbent Henry Moores.
There was also Shakespeare in Italy—two of Zeffirelli's nippiest love scenes and Launce's com- plaint about Crab, by Patrick Wymark and a highly professional dog who inspected the front row, grinned and began passing remarks silently back to Mr Wymark. Dietrich Fischer Dieskau sang and Tamas Vasary played. Sybil Thorndyke was brilliant with Browning, and Laurence Olivier sounded properly sorry for C. Day Lewis's prologue. All through the evening a stream of sober English travellers headed south— Gibbon, Smollett, D. H. Lawrence, Coleridge and Osbert Sitwell, Byron, Beckford, Boswell—and the more who send their purses the same way this winter, and follow themselves in the spring, the better for Italy and them.
H. S.
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