Will Waspe's Whispers
While Alexei Kosygin was allowing himself to be dolled up in Red Indian feathers last week, his
fellow Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was doing his best to add a more seemly cultural touch to their joint adventuring in the Western world. In Paris he thought it proper to take the opportunity to see not only the art treasures of the Louvre (where he was overheard to inquire in some puzzlement what had happened to the arms of the Venus di Milo) but also the thirty Picassos lent from Russia for the artist's ninetieth birthday exhibition at the Galerie de l'Art Moderne. Nobody was tactless enough to ask Brezhnev whether he had seen them before (revolution loot, they are regarded in Russia as examples of harmfully degenerate art and are stored out of sight in locked vaults), and his advisers had equipped him with just the right comment: "Picasso," he said, "is a man of peace. His dove is a good idea."
Inconstant reader
It had been my assumption — from what turns out to be fallacious evidence — that the Sunday Times's 'News in the Arts. man, Kenneth Pearson, was a devoted if tardy reader of this column. Not, apparently, so. Those who are devoted readers will have been surprised by the intelligence he relayed last Sunday about Charles Wood's new play to star Sir John Gielgud. "All concerned," he reported. "are keeping close about the subject." Clearly not all are keeping close, or these gaff-blowing notes would not have been able to disclose all this a couple of weeks ago, and the subject too — which has to do with the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade, a picture on which Wood had the screenwriting credit. It's not the first time, incidentally, that playwright Wood has found inspiration 111 his involvement with the world of the cinema. Two years ago he wrote a television play about a screenwriter who went to Rome to polish up the dialogue' on a film and found himself re-writing the whole script — something which had just hap
pened to Wood after writing The Charge of the Light Brigade. To be sure there
should be no mistake about the parallel, he called his fictitious writer Maple and the fictitious film The Thin Red Line.
Reunion at Euston?
Continuing to eschew the West End fleshpots, Vanessa Redgrave, following her appearance in Cato Street at the Young Vic, will be seen in Antony and Cleopatra at Euston Road's Shaw Theatre next year. Her ex-husband Tony Richardson, they saY' may direct it. Antony is not yet cast. Franco Nero?
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