Monday 10 April
The Bloomsbury set go to Covent Garden to see Lopokova and Massine.
Walter Wanger’s gambit, said the Film Renter, had attracted ‘another class of patron’, and the attendance of Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive Bell, her sometime lover Duncan Grant, and Clive Bell’s current lover Mary Hutchinson, bears this out. Grant had designed one of this week’s divertissements, called the ‘Scottish reel’, for Lopokova, who had had recently begun her affair with John Maynard Keynes, and was living among the Bloomsburyites in Gordon Square. It was not their only attendance at the Opera House – the ballets continued till the end of the month, and the programme changed each week. The main film from the 10th was Love, an American film directed by Wesley Ruggles that Wanger had reportedly bought for distribution himself – there is a suggestion that he was unable to obtain a suitably big film, and it would be the last he showed at the venue.
Other modernists who found themselves having to go to the cinema to see the ballet include T. S. Eliot and, on 27 April, Virginia Woolf. Eliot wrote to Mary Hutchinson that he had thought Massine ‘more brilliant and beautiful than ever’, but his thoughts on Love are a matter for speculation.