Beckett prize

OUR congratulations to theatre and steam-wireless director Lu Kemp for her scooping of the pounds-30,000 Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Award, which aims to become a sort of Turner Prize of the stage by encouraging the shock of the new.

Kemp, who has worked with TAG Theatre Company and the BBC, was awarded the prize for a proposed collaboration with choreographer Dominic Leclerc and sound designer Gareth Fry entitled Almost Blue. Billboard cannot confirm any Costello link with the project (although be sure we shall be asking) , which is described as "a theatrically inventive, sound-led thriller for the stage". It is a murder mystery based on a work by Italian noir writer Carlo Lucarelli and revolves around the experience of a blind man who suffers from synaesthesia - hearing sound in colours.

The show will be premiered at London's Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in November.

Label loses

OUR commiserations to Hyperion, the record label (and home to the BBC SSO) embroiled in a legal dispute over the copyright of a score by seventeenth-century baroque composer Michel-Richard de Lalande, edited by Dr Lionel Sawkins. At the end of last week Lord Justice Mummery confirmed an earlier judgment (against which Hyperion had appealed) and found against the company and in favour of Dr Sawkins. Somewhat baff lingly, he said that Dr Sawkins's effort, skill and time were sufficient to establish the requirement that his edition was an original work.

Lalande is, sadly, in no position to counter-sue, but the legal expenses have left Hyperion in a "precarious position".

City in focus

TOMORROW evening at the Mitchell Library the latest photographic essay on The Dear Green Place will be launched. Glasgow As I See It is the work of Laurence Polli, a 76-year-old former president of the venerable institution that is Queens Park Camera Club, and the result of 60 years' enthusiasm for taking pictures begun with a 16th birthday present.

With a foreword by George Wyllie, whose famous Paper Boat is documented in its plates, the book is priced at pounds-25 and will be for sale in the libraries of Glasgow and East Renfrewshire as well as, in the time-honoured phrase, all good bookshops.

Billboard is edited by Keith Bruce.

Contact: Herald Arts, 200 Renfield Street, Glasgow G2 3QB. 0141 302 7019; or e-mail arts@theherald. co. uk