Julian Hilton, in his essay The Court and its Favours, published in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 19, draws attention to David Storey’s fascination with what may be termed the off-centre: “he deliberately presents, as it were, the two outside panels of a triptych, but consciously removes the middle”. The three acts of his 1971 play The Changing Room are set in the changing room of a Rugby League club before, during and after the match. The match is the least of his concerns, and our interest is only marginal; we never discover the final score, and we the audience are happy to ignore it. Instead Storey wants us to observe the movements and behaviour of a group of closely united people whose actions are not restrained by any external influence.
On the pitch, the rugby players know they have to put on a show because they are being watched. The changing room, however, offers them a sanctuary away from the public gaze, free from the pressure elsewhere imposed on them. This dramatic reversal provides the play’s strength; as the rugby players are being observed in private, the play offers an outstanding atmosphere of comradeship and frankness, which is certainly enhanced by the use of nudity. Storey wants to show that the characters are all members of the same “team” in two ways. First, that they are the “City” side as opposed to their unnamed rivals; secondly, that they are, for a short time, a group of twenty-two segregated men who can talk freely yet privately about wives, girlfriends and other topics of all-male interest. Such a play in such a setting would not have been feasible without the use of nudity because it couldn’t depict the team members getting undressed and bathing, and the play would not ring true. In other later productions such as Equus (1973), Privates on Parade (1977), The Elephant Man (1977) and Bent (1979), the nudity offers a sense of honesty and genuineness; again, the impression would have been obviously false if nudity had been avoided in these cases. And not just male nudity – Nell Dunn’s Steaming (1981) features the women who take refuge and support from using their local baths, and their fight to keep them open in the face of financial cuts by the Council.
In discussing sexuality, topics became daring and challenging. Stephen Poliakoff’s Hitting Town (1975), for example, deals with the incestuous relationship between Clare and her irresponsible brother Ralph. One of his pranks – and certainly the most revealing about his character – is to ring the phone-in programme on the local radio station, pretending to be an eleven-year-old and saying he has had sexual intercourse with his sister, also aged eleven. However, as in so many of Poliakoff’s early plays, the author’s main objective is to create a little colour and excitement to cry out and get noticed against the greys and neons of his soulless Leicester walkways.
Poliakoff was also involved in the writing of possibly the most significant play of its time concerning rape, the infamous Lay-By, first presented by Portable Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. Apparently, after a meeting at the Royal Court, David Hare announced, “Anyone who wants to write a play with me join me in the bar”. Thus Poliakoff, Hare, and five other accomplished playwrights – Howard Brenton, Brian Clark, Trevor Griffiths, Hugh Stoddart and Snoo Wilson – collaborated on this work. The play took as its inspiration a newspaper report discussing the apparent innocence of a van driver, Jack, who had been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for rape, which, it was alleged, took place in the back of his van. In “Lay-By”, the facts of the rape are very blurred; the presence of Jack’s mistress in the van at the same time as the alleged rape adds to the complexity. The play shows the adverse effects of pornography and drugs, and culminates with two hospital orderlies abusing an unconscious girl who is about to die from the effects of a back-street abortion. Finally, her dead body, and those of Jack and his mistress, whose deaths remain unexplained, are washed in what appears to be blood.
The play is a strange mixture of dramatised documentary and fantasy, its unevenness being an inevitable consequence of its group composition. The different styles of Poliakoff and Brenton, for example, may be seen with regard to their artistic treatment of realism. They are at opposing ends of the spectrum: Poliakoff is deeply concerned with realistic presentation – the Wimpy Bar in “Lay-By” is definitely of his invention – whereas Brenton uses more imaginative and fantastic devices, such as the horses in Epsom Downs or the raising of Churchill in The Churchill Play. “Lay-By” had been commissioned by the Royal Court but they eventually refused to present it because it was too daring, and possibly liable to prosecution on the grounds of its possibly tending “to deprave and corrupt persons…likely…to attend it”. Nevertheless, the Royal Court finally accepted it for occasional Sunday performances, and I’m sure the irony of that wasn’t lost on the theatregoing public of the day.
The inclusion of homosexuality in plays was as frequent as it was before the new Act. Peter Nichols created gay characters for both tenderness and ridicule in Privates on Parade, as well as for the humour involved in Terri Dennis’ drag appearances as Marlene Dietrich, Vera Lynn and Carmen Miranda. Earlier in 1967, Simon Gray’s Wise Child had featured female impersonation for much more sinister ends. The play was originally written for the BBC, but the producer to whom it was sent turned it down on the grounds that it would offend the general public. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Lord Chamberlain passed it, with a few cuts. Norman Krasna’s Lady Harry (1978) involved female impersonation and was a total box office failure, running for less than a week at the Savoy Theatre. In 1979 Martin Sherman’s Bent won critical accolades for its boldness and maturity, although its very fragmentary and extended structure detracts from the play as a whole, in my humble opinion. In December 1980 Brenton’s The Romans in Britain arrived at the National Theatre to great scandal and I’ll be looking at this episode in theatre history separately later.
In the 1970s you could find much cruder examples of religious irreverence than were around before 1968. Two notable examples are “God? Are You there? Bastard… Well fuck you, God the fucking father, and fuck you Jesus Creepers and fuck you, God the Holy Fucking Ghost” (Deeds by Brenton, Griffiths, Campbell and Hare, 1978) and “Shitting, pissing, spewing, puking, fucking Jesus Christ” (Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill, 1976). The latter example, in particular, appears solely to set out to shock, and although it is a fairly effective device, and certainly an alliterative curse, its very frankness detracts from its meaning and, in the final analysis, it’s just a bunch of words. At least when Samuel Beckett wrote “He doesn’t exist!” in Endgame he substantiated his claim.
It’s interesting to think what might have happened if these plays had been written ten years earlier. They would then have been open to prosecution under the old Blasphemy Act of 1697 which was not repealed under the 1967 Criminal Law Act. Paragraph 44 of the 1967 Committee’s report states that “violation of religious reverence is covered by the law of blasphemy” and cited this as a safeguard against offensive texts in its recommendation that censorship be withdrawn. However, in the same year the Criminal Law Act repealed the 1697 Act, and as a result, the “violation of religious reverence” is not held a crime under any circumstances. The old Act, which had been passed for general suppression of blasphemy and profanity, read:
“An offence is committed in:
(1) shockingly or irreverently ridiculing or impugning the doctrines of the Christian faith, or
(2) uttering or publishing contumelious reproaches of Jesus Christ, or
(3) profane scoffing at the Holy Scriptures or exposing any part thereof to contempt or ridicule.”
Caryl Churchill’s description of Christ mentioned above is clearly contumelious, and under the strict codes of law, the passage would have been illegal. One can only speculate whether this forgotten old law would have been brought into practice against such writing.
In my next blog post I’ll take a look at blasphemy in post-1968 theatre.