Policing the stage. . - Reviews - book review

Contemporary Review, June, 2002 by Tom Phillips

Politics, Prudery and Perversions. Nicholas de Jongh. Methuen. [pounds sterling]16.99. ISBN 0-413-70650-6.

The impact of censorship on British theatre has often been underplayed. Certainly, if one makes the predictable comparisons with Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, the British system was relatively benign -- or, at least, inefficient. Between 1737 and 1968 the Lord Chamberlain's office was responsible for licensing scripts for public performance, that is, were the state's censors. Although they sturdily protected public morals by preventing the sound of a toilet's flushing being heard on stage and routinely objected to bed scenes and bare flesh, they were neither infallible nor inflexible. Slang and innuendo frequently slipped through their net, especially when it was deployed by such talented but subversively dedicated wordsmiths such as Noel Coward or Joe Orton. Also, an enterprising producer could, with the help of the right social skills, persuade the censors to change their minds.

That said, it would be naive to assume that theatre censorship had only a minimal impact. As the London Evening Standard's theatre critic, Nicholas de Jongh, argues in this robustly entertaining and yet also deeply serious book, in the twentieth century the often heavy-handed intervention of the censor effectively isolated British theatre from the main currents of European modernism. This contributed to the intellectual brain drain away from drama which left it in a malnourished, almost moribund state for more than fifty years.

Anything other than 'polite naturalism' was liable to be bowdlerised or banned outright by the dutiful if rather philistine employees of the Lord Chamberlain and even plays such as Ibsen's Ghosts or Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author -- which are now routinely taught in schools -- were, for many years, deemed to be unsuitable for public performance.

British playwrights attempting to write in a similarly frank or experimental vein had little hope of seeing their work performed in an uncut form and were, according to Mr de Jongh, 'conditioned by the dark ages of censorship to accept its governing codes'. 'The Lord Chamberlain', he adds, 'insisted that dramatists give their characters a clean bill of speech...Dramatis personae spoke in a prescribed tongue of bland primness, detached from most people's realities'.

To some extent, of course, the so-called theatre revolution of 1956 changed all that, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at least opened a crack through which reality could seep back onto the stage and during the final twelve years of its reign the Lord Chamberlain's office had to deal with an increasing number of scripts which pushed at or flaunted the rules. Edward Bond's 1965 play, Saved, for example, became a cause celebre. The sequence in which a gang of bored youths stone a baby to death inflamed a particularly bitter controversy. Ignoring the fact that many of Shakespeare's violent -- but, from the censors' point of view, perfectly acceptable -- scenes (the blinding of Gloucester or Lavinia's mutilation) are far more shocking, it precipitated debate at the highest level. Somewhat ironically, this debate led not to the tightening up of the licensing system but to its eventual abolition under the 1968 Theatres Act.

But if 1956 was a turning point, the battle against censorship had, in fact, been going on ever since the 'Ibsen business' of the 1890s. Mr de Jongh recounts these frequent and often long-running skirmishes between the theatre world and its police force in detail and uses the Lord Chamberlain's correspondence, examiners' reports and internal memoranda to create a vivid picture of how the censorship system actually operated. Excising expletives and preventing on-stage nudity were not the censors' only concerns and the chapters dealing with the impact censorship had on the protrayal of women and homosexuals on stage and the not-so-secret history of political censorship are particularly illuminating.

In his final chapter, the author reflects on the consequences of liberalisation and suggests, rather ominously, that 'the chains and handcuffs have been put away; but the power and the temptation to bring them out again remain'. Clause 6 of the existing Theatres Act allows for prosecutions to be brought against any performance 'likely to occasion a breach of the peace'. This might come as a strange kind of reassurance to playwrights working in a world where the theatre appears to be fast becoming a minority interest. The law, at least, still takes their artform seriously.