Tag Archives: Stage

Theatre Censorship – 5: Arguments and Offence

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The report of the Joint Committee of 1909 argued the benefits for and against four main options: to continue with the current system; to continue with compulsory pre-censorship (but not necessarily under the Lord Chamberlain); to introduce a system of voluntary pre-censorship; and the total abolition of censorship. In the end they recommended this final solution. Paragraph 39 of their report reads: “The ending of pre-censorship in its present form will not necessarily mean that henceforth there will be a complete free-for-all. Censorship in the widest sense of the word will inevitably continue and by various means control will be exercised over what appears on the stage. Managements will continue to refuse to put on plays whenever they think fit. Theatre critics will continue to describe plays as they wish. The public will be free to refuse to attend plays or to walk out if they do not like them. Finally the Courts will have the task of ensuring that those responsible for presenting plays which transgress the law of the land will receive appropriate punishment” – just like Lord Chesterfield said in 1737. It only took 231 years for the powers that be to reach the same conclusion.

My own belief is that this was a very perceptive statement. There’s no censorship as effective as commercial censorship. You can write whatever outrageous material you wish, but if you can’t get a producer to back it financially, it’s never going to see light of day. Same goes for the critics; if a play gets slated, and the people don’t come, your six month run in the West End can finish after a week – again that’s a commercial decision.

The report continued: “The effect of the recommendations of the Committee will be to allow freedom of speech in the theatre subject to the overriding requirements of the criminal law which generally speaking applies to other forms of art in this country. The anachronistic powers of the Lord Chamberlain will be abolished and will not be replaced by any other form of pre-censorship, national or local.”

However, as I mentioned earlier, the recommendation of the 1909 Committee was completely ignored by Asquith’s government, and the status quo continued until the 1960s.

The Members of the Committee of 1966-67, whom you’ll remember, gentle reader, also recommended the abolition of stage censorship, were unanimous in their decision, and of all the individuals and groups they interviewed, only the Society of West End Theatre Managers (SWET) defended the position of the Lord Chamberlain and wished pre-censorship to continue: “The Lord Chamberlain to us has been a sort of father confessor and we have been able to go and talk to him and substitute one word for another,” said their president, Emile Littler; “we would miss him very much.” I sense some thinly veiled toadying going on there. Mind you, Emile Littler was never the most experimental or daring theatre manager. For example, his opinion of Joe Orton’s ground-breaking Entertaining Mr Sloane was that it was “absolutely filthy”, according to John Lahr’s excellent biography of Orton, Prick up your Ears.

According to Littler, the greatest fear of SWET was that theatre managements could face problems with their audiences: “so long as we can warn,” he said. “Let us tell the people what they are going to see”. They feared some plays might damage the theatre as a lucrative business. Littler couldn’t have been much of an expert at the art of commercial censorship in that case.

So what kind of play did Littler and SWET fear would become the norm and would alienate their audiences? I think Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (1966) – or “Die Publikumsbeschimpfung” in its original German, serves as a good example. Not that it would ever have hit SWET’s radar; indeed, when the play was first performed in Britain in 1970, it was produced by “The Other Company”, a group who were part of the Inter-Action network from 1968 to 1972, scarcely a well-established conventional group of performers; and it was performed at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho, scarcely the epitome of London’s glittering West End.

Don’t worry if you don’t know the play – I’ll tell you about it. In a nutshell, four performers on an empty stage spend the evening insulting the audience. No other plot, no other purpose. The power (if there is any) of Handke’s play is derived from the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the refined appearance of the members of the audience (in those days you’d dress for the theatre), the unctuous service of the ushers and the enigmatic hints of scenery or prop noises on stage hidden by the tantalising, shimmering front curtain; and, on the other hand, once the play has started, the subsequent tirade of sarcasm, abuse and ridicule delivered by the four youths on stage against the misled audience.

The speeches are geared to make the audience feel very self-conscious; by referring to their seating arrangement, and to the strange, almost inhuman way they have all been herded together like cattle without any real connection with each other:

“You are sitting in a certain order. You are facing in a certain direction. You are sitting equidistant from one another.”

The audience’s self-consciousness grows more acute as they become the subject of the play. They are ridiculed by the bareness of what they have come to see: something unreal, lacking in significance:

“This stage represents nothing”.

By extension, the audience themselves become nothing; they become a mere show:

“You look charming. You look enchanting. You look dazzling. You look breathtaking. You look unique. But you don’t make an evening. You’re not a brilliant idea. You are tiresome. You are not a rewarding subject. You are a theatrical blunder.”

The escalation of this provocation is taken to enormous lengths in a description of how each member of the audience is presumed suddenly to become aware of parts of their bodies and their activities:

“You become aware of your throat. You become aware how heavy your head is. You become aware of your sex organs. You become aware of batting your eyelids. You become aware of the muscles with which you swallow…”

At the end of the play comes a series of insults, each worse than the last, to humiliate the worst aspects of the audience members’ characteristics, their worthlessness, their politics, their diseases:

“You butchers, you buggers, you bullshitters, you bullies…”; “you supernumaries, you superfluous lives, you crumbs, you cardboard figures…”; “you reactionaries, you conshies, you ivory-tower artists, you defeatists…”; “O you cancer victims, O you haemorrhoid sufferers, O you multiple sclerotics, O you syphilitics…”

And so on. I have quoted at length from the play in order to allow Handke’s own words to show how frankly tedious the piece is! As you can doubtless tell, I’m not a fan of this play but I do think it’s a fascinating work. After the insults, the stage directions insist that the curtain falls swiftly and that an audience’s taped cheering is played until all the people leave – or are driven out. The paying theatregoers have no chance to put their views across, to defend themselves against what they have seen. Handke proves one thing at least: that any word, spoken with enough venom, can become an insult. By the end of the play, mankind has been broken down into nothing but worthlessness and disease. The play’s vision of the people who have come to see it is one of fallibility and inadequacy. The audience has been duped, insulted, and packed off in silence. We’ve taken your money, thank you; now bog off.

Handke’s overriding assumption of the stupidity of his audience is basically asking for trouble. There’s nothing to stop people walking out or boycotting it if they so wish, just as the 1967 Committee Members had stated in their report. I’ve no knowledge of whether performances of Handke’s play were or were not boycotted in this way, but I’ve also no knowledge of any major attempts to restage it. This is the kind of play that SWET were concerned might become the norm. They envisaged a potential growing disenchantment between the theatregoing public and such raw entertainment, for want of a better word. But, thankfully, in retrospect, it hasn’t happened.

In my next post, I’ll look at how censorship affected a few more plays of the 1950s and 60s, and the use of theatre clubs to get around the legislation.

Theatre Censorship – 4: Examiners and a quick look at the Restoration

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By the twentieth century, the post of Examiner of Plays had been the subject of some disrepute; a fine example of it’s not what you know it’s who you know. George Redford (Examiner of Plays 1895 – 1911), for example, was only awarded the job because he was a personal friend of his predecessor E F Smythe-Pigott (Examiner of Plays 1874 – 1895), and it was Charles Brookfield, previously a writer of scurrilous plays (poacher turned gamekeeper indeed) and a friend of Redford, who took over when the latter retired. Brookfield died shortly after taking up his appointment in 1913, and after this date the Lord Chamberlain himself became more personally involved in the licensing of plays. The last official Examiner was George Street, and on his retirement in 1936, the work which the Lord Chamberlain chose not to do was passed on to more junior officers known as the Comptrollers, although the Lord Chamberlain himself usually attended to the more controversial material.

To submit a new play for licensing – that is, a play first presented after 22nd August 1843 – the producer had to follow a procedure which was to remain virtually unchanged from 1843 to 1968. A copy of the text, accompanied by a fee of two guineas, had to be sent to St James’ Palace to be read by the Lord Chamberlain, or, more likely, one of his officers, before rehearsals were due to commence. It should be noted that the fee was considered as a payment for reading the play only. If a licence was refused, the two guineas were not returned. However, with any luck, the licence would be sent back quickly. It would have read:

“I, the Lord Chamberlain of the (King’s /Queen’s) Household for the time being, do by virtue of my Office and in pursuance of powers given to me by the Act of Parliament for regulating Theatres, 6 & 7 Victoria, Cap 68, Section 12, Allow the Performance of a new Stage Play of which a copy has been submitted to me by you, being a …….. in ……Acts, entitled…….. with the exception of all Words and Passages which are specified in the endorsement of the Licence and without any further variation whatsoever.

“Given under my hand this…..day of …..19…..

Lord Chamberlain”.

As well as the ‘specified Words and Passages’, the licence also bore a list of five regulations, which largely followed the guidelines set down in 1909, “the strict observance” of which, it read, “is to be considered as the condition upon which the Licence is signed.” By the way, if you can’t remember the 1909 guidelines, don’t worry, that’s because I haven’t told you about them yet! Patience, gentle reader. The regulations forbade the appearance of use on stage of “profanity or impropriety of language”, “indecency of dress, dance or gesture”, “objectionable personalities”, “anything calculated to produce a riot or breach of the peace” and “offensive representation of living persons”. It also instructed that “any change of title must be submitted for the Lord Chamberlain’s approval”.

If there was a delay getting a response from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, this normally meant that, instead of the licence, a letter would eventually arrive headed “The Lord Chamberlain disallows the following parts of the stage-play:…” This would mean that the director and a representative of the management would have to go to St James’ Palace and argue their case. In later years the author would get involved as well, although the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was never keen to recognise authors – the censor once wrote to the playwright Sydney Grundy who had dared to question why his play May and December had not received a licence, only to be informed that “he could take no official notice of (his) existence”.

Sometimes managements had to chase up the Lord Chamberlain’s Office because they took so long to come to a decision. Frank Marcus’ The Killing of Sister George (1965) was granted a licence only after the producer Michael Codron sent a note in panic to the censor reminding him that there were only ten days before the play was due to open. The onus was always on the management to secure the obtaining of the licence.

If a play was considered to be so offensive that even drastic changes would not alter its tone, the text would be sent back and no licence issued. The decision would be unequivocal and final. For example, on 8th November 1967 the copy of Edward Bond’s Early Morning, a play which featured Queen Victoria as a lesbian and with her two sons as conjoined twins, was returned to the Royal Court marked “His Lordship would not allow it”, with no other comment. This was the last play to be banned, but no one knows exactly how many potentially marvellous manuscripts had previously been returned with similar disgust, and which have never seen the light of day since.

However novel the shift of drama in the mid-1950s and 60s might appear in retrospect – bearing in mind the critic John Russell Taylor’s great quote “some of the new dramatists were naturally novel, some caught novelty, and some had novelty thrust upon them”, a similar situation had already arisen at the time of the Restoration period. Before the Cromwellian era playwrights had been keen to satirise puritans; Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair (1614) is a typical example. Angelo, the “precise” character who creates all the misery in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), is a typical puritan, invoking an ancient law that makes all forms of fornication a crime punishable by death. Under Cromwell, plays were banned, most theatres destroyed and no other entertainments such as Morris Dancing permitted. But on the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, theatre again returned to London, and, not surprisingly, audiences wanted as much satire and bawdy in a play as could reasonably be crammed into two hours’ performance time. Courtall, in George Etherege’s She Would If She Could (1668) appreciates how the theatre reflects Restoration life: “a single intrigue in love is as dull as a single plot in a play, and will tire a lover worse than t’other does an audience.” Fortunately for the Restoration patrons, Walpole’s Theatre Act was not to arrive for 70 years or so.

Whilst we’re in the Restoration era, a word or two about Sodom (or the Quintessence of Debauchery), allegedly written by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and privately performed at the Court of King Charles II in or around 1678. It’s a satire, dealing with the corruption and vice of the monarch, and, unsurprisingly, Charles II didn’t appreciate it. Published copies (it was published in Antwerp, no one in England dared touch it) were seized, book dealers who sold it were prosecuted, and when it finally made its way to the Examiner of Plays in 1737, it was summarily dismissed. I’ve only read a synopsis, and it seems there’s little doubt that Rochester allowed his fantasies to run riot. Any play that promotes anal sex between gentlemen, and features characters by the names Bolloxinion, Buggeranthos, Clytoris, Cunticula, Fuckadilla and Prince Pricket, would probably only ever appeal to a niche audience! It’s only once been performed in public in the UK – in 2011 at the Edinburgh Fringe, perhaps unsurprisingly.

It is possible to draw a parallel between the puritan era of Cromwell and the mid-20th century when, as a reaction to the stress of the Second World War, early post-war drama avoided any great emotional content and most plays dealt with ‘safe’ subjects and situations. Naturally, this also avoided playwrights conflicting with the Lord Chamberlain. The Restoration period, with its determination to express itself at all costs, may be equated with the 1950s and 1960s, particularly since sex and personal satire figure so acutely in the works of both periods, and playwrights such as Etherege, Wycherley and Vanbrugh were able to deal with matters that would have been censored in the 1950s.

Thanks for reading this far. In my next post I’m going to be looking at the reactions to the abolition of censorship and will be looking in some detail at Peter Handke’s play Offending the Audience. No real need to do any research – and I don’t suppose anyone will actually have seen it (I certainly haven’t!) See you soon!

Theatre Censorship – 3: Prime Ministers and Parliament

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It wasn’t until 1737 that Robert Walpole, the first statesman to be regarded as Prime Minister of Great Britain, introduced the Licensing Act to make the censoring of plays one of the Lord Chamberlain’s official and compulsory duties. Up till then it had simply been a matter of practice, and obeying the whims of the monarch of the time, but Walpole firmed it up in law. I rather like the wording of the Licensing Act 1737:

“From and after the twenty fourth day of June, one thousand seven hundred and thirty seven, every person who shall, for hire, gain, or reward, act, represent, or perform, or cause to be acted, represented, or performed, any interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play, farce, or other entertainment of the stage, or any part or parts therein, in case such person shall not have any legal settlement in the place where the same shall be acted, represented, or performed, without authority by virtue of letters patent from his Majesty, his heirs, successors or predecessors, or without licence from the Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty’s household for the time being, shall be deemed to be a rogue and a vagabond within the intent and meaning of the said recited act, and shall be liable and subject to all such penalties and punishments, and by such methods of conviction, as are inflicted on or appointed by the said act for the punishment of rogues and vagabonds who shall be found wandering, begging, and misordering themselves, within the intent and meaning of the said recited act.” If you were found to be a rogue and a vagabond because you didn’t get a licence for your play you would be fined the sum of £50 – which in 1737 was a very big sum indeed.

Walpole and his government had been the subjects of a series of satirical jibes in the plays of both John Gay and, more particularly, Henry Fielding, whose “Historical Register for the year 1736” was considered by Walpole to be the ultimate insult. Among the satirical observations and the devious characters, it included a corrupt fiddler called Quidam (translated in my old Cassell’s compact Latin dictionary as a certain person or thing (known, but not necessarily named), who was clearly a caricature of Walpole himself. The main intention behind the new Act was to secure a basis from which the country could be governed without fear of ridicule generated by rogues and vagabonds on stage. The Act required the Lord Chamberlain to appoint an examiner who would read all new plays at least fourteen days before the first performance, any which he did not see fit to license being subsequently prohibited from the stage. Fielding, knowing the game was up, turned to novels.

The only voice of dissent in Parliament, whose protest has survived today, came from Lord Chesterfield who denounced Walpole’s Act, not only because it offended against freedom of expression and would involve more bureaucracy, but chiefly because the laws of the country, when applied to dramatists, were adequate protection against possible offence. “Our laws are sufficient”, he maintained, “for punishing any man that shall dare to represent upon the stage what may appear, either by words or the representation, to be blasphemous, seditious or immoral…If the stage becomes at any time licentious, if a play appears to be a libel upon the Government or upon any particular man, the King’s courts are open.” This last argument was frequently cited in the meetings of the 1967 Committee. He was also concerned at giving so much power to one, unelected, man: “A power lodged in the hands of one single man, to judge and determine, without any limitation, without any control or appeal, is a sort of power unknown to our laws, inconsistent with our constitution. It is a higher, a more absolute power than we trust even to the King himself.”

Holding the honour of being the first play to be banned under the Licensing Act is Gustavus Vasa, by Henry Brooke. Ostensibly it’s a story of Swedish patriots defending themselves against invasion by Danish and Norwegian troops; but in reality it’s a thinly disguised satire criticising Walpole for his tyrannical control over Parliament. The Lord Chamberlain at the time, the Duke of Grafton, awarded the play an outright ban from being performed anywhere in England, giving no reason other than “there was a good deal of liberty in it.” In the short term, Brooke did well from the debacle, as he arranged for a private publication of the play which created a lot of attention and he earned about £1000 from the sales – Lord Chesterfield bought ten copies. However, with his reputation at court in tatters, he found it difficult to get new plays performed. He wrote a couple of novels, but lived most of his life in penury.

The 1737 Act brought to an end the usefulness of the Revels’ Office; the Master’s judgements had usually been ignored in any case. There remained, nevertheless, a Master of the Revels until 1755; the last man to hold this post was Solomon Dayrolle, but there was no work for him to carry out. That’s because all the licensing had been delegated to the new Examiner of Plays, a role created by the 1737 Act – even though the ultimate responsibility still remained with the Lord Chamberlain. Whilst it was useful for an Examiner of Plays to be interested in the theatre – high on the “person specification” for the job interview, one would imagine – the Lord Chamberlain, with all his other Royal Household duties to perform, needn’t have been a theatre buff. As a result, the Examiner of Plays held real power over the censorship procedure, and usually the Lord Chamberlain would simply rubber-stamp the Examiner’s judgment. Not always though; in 1777, Edward Capell, the Deputy Examiner of Plays and puritanical Shakespeare fan, disapproved of Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and wanted it banned. But the Lord Chamberlain at the time, Lord Hertford, overruled him – just as well; how much poorer our lives would have been without the escapades of Sir Peter Teazle and the gossip of Lady Sneerwell.

Despite a review of the Act in 1832, a new Theatres Act in 1843, and Select Committees in 1853, 1866, and 1892, the position remained largely unchanged throughout the 19th century. It was not until the Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship), 1909, that any new criticism against the censorship procedure was officially voiced. For the first time, a set of guidelines was suggested for the Examiner of Plays to follow; some of them were unofficially accepted, although none was legally enforced. The other main contention of the 1909 Committee was that the submission of new plays to the Lord Chamberlain should be optional, and therefore that the production of an unlicensed play should not be illegal.

However, the consequences of producing an unlicensed play that was found to offend public decency, would have been considerable. From the 1909 Committee Report: “If the Director of Public Prosecutions is of opinion that any unlicensed play which has been performed is open to objection on the ground of indecency, he should prefer an indictment against the manager of the theatre where the play has been produced, and against the author of the play. When notice has been given to the manager of the theatre by the Director of Public Prosecutions of his intention to take proceedings, it should be illegal for any further performances of the play to take place until the case has been heard and decided. The Court before which an indictment is preferred should be empowered to make one or more of the following orders according to the merits of the case:

(a) Prohibiting the performance of the play for such period as they may think fit, but for not more than ten years.
(b) Imposing penalties on the manager of the theatre.
(c) Imposing penalties on the author of the play.
(d) Endorsing a conviction on the licence of the theatre.”

But the findings of the 1909 Committee were largely ignored (apart from the suggested guidelines for the Examiner of Plays) and the Theatres Act 1843 remained unmodified.

In my next post, I’ll be looking at the Examiners of Plays and also a quick look back at the Restoration Era. See you soon!

Theatre Censorship – 2: Shakespeare and Censorship

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In my previous blog post I mentioned how Shakespeare used the character of Philostrate to poke fun at the censor. In Hamlet, the bumbling Polonius also gave Shakespeare the opportunity to ridicule those who interfere with dramatic freedom. Unlike Philostrate, who holds the position of Master of the Revels, Polonius actually is the Lord Chamberlain himself; he is more senior and therefore, maybe, he ought to command greater respect. Theseus treats Philostrate as a mere hurdle whereas Claudius and Gertrude at least pretend to consider what Polonius has to say.

Polonius is so full of spirit when he tells Hamlet of the actors’ arrival that he tries to convince him of his extensive familiarity with the dramatic art with his ludicrous assembly of stage conventions: “Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”. Again, it’s fairly obvious that Shakespeare is exposing the Lord Chamberlain as a fool.

Later Polonius is quick to point out that the First Player’s speech is “too long”; no doubt he would have insisted on (in Philostrate’s words) an “abridgement” here. He approves of the phrase “mobled queen” because of the use of the rare and possibly incomprehensible word “mobled” where “veiled” would have been understood by everyone. Moreover, he describes Hamlet’s recital as being of “good discretion”; no doubt the Lord Chamberlain then, as in the 1960s, hoped for compliance with “good discretion” and an awareness of tasteful maturity on the part of the author or performer in order to make his life easier.

Is there any particular reason why Shakespeare might have been so opposed to the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain? Had they crossed swords over the content of any of his plays? It was Queen Elizabeth I, then aged around 63, who furiously objected to the portrayal of the weak Richard II (in Shakespeare’s play that bears his name) as an analogy to her Royal Goodliness. In fact, she ordered the scene where the king was deposed to be removed from all copies of the text. Apparently, conspirators who supported the Earl of Essex’s plan to overthrow the Queen paid the Chamberlain’s men actors £2 above the going rate (in other words, a bribe) to perform the censored scene the day before the planned rebellion. The rebellion failed, and so did the bribe – although the scene that the Queen objected to remained expurgated for two centuries.

The Merchant of Venice has attracted its fair share of censorship, in response to what many have considered to be the anti-Semitism of the character of Shylock. However, that didn’t really become an issue until the 18th century, so wouldn’t have been a problem for Shakespeare. As for Hamlet, the biggest problem was that King James ruled England with his consort – the Danish born Queen Anne. There’s quite a lot of criticism about Denmark in Hamlet – and manuscript copies of the 1605 quarto edition show that the lines where Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Denmark is a prison, “in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst” were removed. After all, mustn’t upset the Queen Consort, must we! King Lear, too, required some rewriting to remove veiled references to King James, his method of government and military affairs; and lines that referred to a French invasion of Britain were cut and modified.

However, it was King Henry IV, Part II that caused Shakespeare major problems, and considering it was written just a few years before Hamlet, this might have affected how Shakespeare considered the character of Polonius. Firstly, Sir John Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, but that noble knight’s descendants were offended by this and took their objection directly to Queen Elizabeth, who instructed Shakespeare to change the name – even though she enjoyed the characterisation. More troublesome were all the speeches made by the rebel leaders, which appear in the Folio edition of the plays but are strangely absent from the Quarto. The effect of the censorship was to diminish the importance of the character of Scroop, Archbishop of York and to remove all comments that expressed approval of the rebellion. Obviously, that’s going to seriously detract from the play as a whole. Here’s an extract from the introduction to King Henry IV Part II by A. R. Humphreys in the Arden Shakespeare published in 1966. It’s quite long but it explains a lot about why this play was such a problem.

“Passages innocent in 1597 would sound dangerous in 1600. By then, two dangers were at their climaxes – the Irish insurrection, which Essex failed to crush in 1599, and Essex’s own disaster. As Hart points out, “early in 1600 Oviedo, a Franciscan monk, had come from Spain to Ireland with the title of Bishop of Dublin; in April he conferred with the native chieftains, gave them £6,000 in money, and promised them Spanish military aid”. A text which showed an archbishop rising against an established monarch, proclaiming the good of the nation, religiously blessing insurrection, and citing Richard II’s death under Bolingbroke, might well seem an allegory for Oviedo and the Irish leaders fighting Elizabeth, and pleading the cause of Ireland and the Roman Church against the Queen under whom the symbol of their faith, Mary Queen of Scots, had been executed.”

What with that, and the Queen’s reaction to Richard II, this was a difficult time for Shakespeare to be writing history plays!

Of course, in the Victorian era, that great idiot Thomas Bowdler re-wrote many of the plays and published them in his Family Shakespeare, removing all the licentious issues, scurrilous name-calling, suggestions of infidelity and incest, and giving the tragedies a happy ending – much as Dickens satirised with the Vincent Crummles acting troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. He was a fashion, a fad; and I’m not going to give him any more publicity!

In my next post, I’m going to look at how future laws firmed up the legal position on theatre censorship. Thanks for reading!

Theatre Censorship – 1: Censors, Chamberlains and a bag of Revels

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On May 17th, 1966, in the House of Lords, Lord Stonham, a junior minister at the Home Office under Harold Wilson’s government, moved “that it is desirable that a Joint Committee of both Houses be appointed to review the law and practice relating to the censorship of stage plays” (quoted from the Report of the Joint Committee in Censorship in the Theatre 1966-7).

With that simple statement the process started. The Committee was chaired by George Strauss (Labour MP for Vauxhall) and its number included many notable politicians of the day including Michael Foot (who would become Labour leader) and Norman St John Stevas (Conservative MP for Chelmsford, later Minister of State for the Arts). Many meetings, interviews, and reports later, held over a period of nineteen months, the Committee recommended that “pre-censorship and licensing of plays should cease”.

Nowhere else in the free world did one man, the Lord Chamberlain, whose traditional role had always been that of Head of the Sovereign’s Household, have the right to censor material for the stage; nor was there any other form of creative art where a censor held absolute power to determine its circulation. The Committee did not seek to confer any special privileges on the theatre that weren’t enjoyed by other forms of art. Its report concluded: “The effect of the recommendations will be to allow freedom of speech in the theatre subject to the overriding requirements of the criminal law which, generally speaking, applies to other forms of art in this country”.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Let’s first consider the nature of a censor. Originally he was a Roman officer in charge of maintaining the Census; rather like a supreme Administrator. His other function was that of overseer of public morals. The last time magistrates were elected into this position was in 22 BC. Funny how little that changed over a couple of millennia! Certainly in Britain the censor was an unelected post.

Since the fourteenth century the Lord Chamberlain or the Master of the Revels, under his command, had supervised the production of plays. There’s a splendid old book called Censorship in England by F Fowell and F Palmer published in 1913, which states that the earliest recorded date of the Master of the Revels’ work is 1347, when he took charge of Edward III’s Christmas entertainment.

I am sure that this role was resented even at its inception. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, Shakespeare includes the brief appearance of Philostrate, described in the Dramatis Personae as “Theseus’ Master of the Revels”. Theseus himself refers to him as “our usual manager of mirth” when he calls for some entertainment. Philostrate tries to take control of the situation, but Shakespeare is having none of it. He is a fussy and futile character, and Shakespeare delights in poking fun at him.

Theseus asks Philostrate: “Say, what abridgement have you for this evening?” Learned literature students will tell you that the meaning of this question means “what do you have to shorten or while away the time?” But I also sense there’s a double meaning, implying that Philostrate likes to exercise his blue pencil and cut passages of which he did not approve from the words of the author; as would all censors throughout the ages. The same word is used in Shakespeare’s epic poem, The Rape of Lucrece: “This brief abridgement of my will I make: My soul and body to the skies and ground; My resolution, husband, do thou take”. It’s clear to me that Shakespeare uses the word in the sense that we are listening to an abridged version of a longer original piece of writing.

Later at Theseus’ request to hear the dreaded Pyramus and Thisbe, we actually witness Philostrate step in as the shameless censor, and try to prevent Theseus from seeing it: “No, my noble Lord, it is not for you: I have heard it over, and it is nothing, nothing in the world”. Thus Philostrate reveals the arrogant belief of the censor that a grown adult – indeed, no less than the King himself – is not qualified to exercise sufficient discretion in choosing his own entertainment. The censor is exposed as a killjoy, an upstart and a control freak; and no doubt to Shakespeare’s extreme satisfaction, Theseus ignores Philostrate’s plea and insists on seeing the play that he chooses.

In my next blog post we’ll look at a couple of brushes that Shakespeare had with the censor.

Stage Censorship – an Introduction

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It was fifty years ago – or at least it will be on September 26th – that stage censorship was abolished in the UK. Many avid theatregoers of today might ask, “what’s stage censorship?” Indeed, generations have now enjoyed the liberty and expression that a, generally, free theatre offers. But prior to 1968, each new play had to go through a process of being read and evaluated, and potentially censored, before it reached the stage. And unlike films, which also have a censorship procedure, there was no classification of U, A, AA, and X (as it was in 1968 – U, PG, 12, 15, and 18 today). There’s no age restriction on a play unless the theatre where it’s playing chooses to adopt an age limit on any one particular production.

Occasionally films are subject to blanket censorship – the British Board of Film Classification can refuse to licence a film, or to insist on cuts before licensing. But that’s comparatively rare; the main element of film censorship in the UK is simply a matter of protecting people under 18 from seeing material deemed unsuitable for them. Not so in the theatre pre-1968. A play was either licensed “as is”, in other words as presented by the theatre management with no changes to the text; or the censor would require certain passages to be removed or rewritten; or it would be banned outright.

Back in 1981 a hopeful, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed young Mr Chrisparkle, with an unspectacular degree from a spectacular university in English Literature under his belt, applied to a number of universities to spend two years researching The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship. Many failed to respond at all; several politely declined; some rudely declined (yes, University of Wales at Lampeter, I’m looking at you); some made constructive suggestions whilst still declining; and one – Queen Mary College at the University of London, bless them – said yes. I was really pleased at that, because one of the lecturers at Queen Mary was the playwright Simon Gray, whose works I greatly admired (and still do). What surprised me was that it wasn’t the late Mr Gray who ended up being my supervisor, but an American lecturer by the name of Dr Paul Kirschner. I found out after many years that Dr Kirschner was a devotee of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, as was my tutor at Oxford, Dr Francis Warner. I have no idea if this was a coincidence or not; knowing academia, possibly not.

Sadly, Dr Kirschner and I had different views on what my thesis would contain. He was, of course, right, and did his best to point me in the right direction towards achieving that elusive Master of Philosophy degree. But I couldn’t write what he wanted me to write, even though I tried really hard. After about 18 months of fascinating research, extensive writing and a whole lot of brick wall head banging, I decided to call it a day. One of the main problems was, having called it “The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship”, I largely concluded that there weren’t any. That was probably the wrong conclusion to draw, but once I’d got that idea into my head, there wasn’t any progress to be made!

Since then, I’ve often wondered what, if anything, I should do with all the research and writing I had done. I’ve looked at it, laughed at the pomposity of my writing style, cringed at how politically slanted my approach was, gasped at my occasional use of awfully non-PC terminology (well it was 35 years ago), and accepted that no way was this stuff ever going to get me a postgraduate degree! Additionally, over the years, some much brighter brains than mine have published excellent books about the history of stage censorship, and I’m in no position to compete with them.

But the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of stage censorship seems too good an opportunity to miss, and I feel I must mark it in some way. Now that I am 9 years into my blog and I have a devoted readership to whom I am extremely grateful for their attention and kindness, I thought it was time to take another look at what I’d written. Jazz it up a little for the 21st century and bring in a few ideas and events that hadn’t even happened at the time – after all, drama didn’t end in 1983. There’ll be some history, some background, some personal observations, even some literary criticism – I know, get me. Above all, I’m hoping to remove much of that faux-academic style that I could never master anyway.

The plan is largely to keep to the same structure as my original thesis, which means some chapters are quite short and others are quite long – especially when I get into the nitty-gritty of (what I think are) two significant pre-withdrawal plays, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Edward Bond’s Saved. I’ll mention in advance any plays that I’m going to consider in any great detail, so you can have a re-read or a quick Google to refresh your memory. But I’m going to try to break down the longer chapters into bite-sized chunks so that you don’t have to put aside a whole evening just to wade through some interminable stuff about old plays. Even tragedy is meant to be fun sometimes!

To prepare you for what’s ahead: in the first couple of posts I’ll be doing some introductory stuff and looking at some Shakespeare, Restoration comedy and the 18th century ridiculing of politicians, which was really what got the censorial ball rolling in the first place. No need for you to do any research, and don’t worry, I’ll keep it light!

So, gentle reader, we embark on a new project for summer 2018. I give you, not “The Effects of the Withdrawal of Stage Censorship”, but “Stage Censorship? Leave it Out!” Welcome!

Theatre Censorship – Rita Sue and Bob Too at the Royal Court, or not

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Theatre Censorship is one of my favourite topics. Get me drunk and I’ll either tell you about fourteen ways of making a new word in the English language without borrowing from foreign languages (no, honestly), or I’ll blather on about why Frank Marcus’ The Killing of Sister George wasn’t banned but Edward Bond’s Saved was. Official censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office ceased in 1968 – fifty years ago next year, more of which later – but there’s no more effective form of censorship than commercial censorship. You might have written The Best Play Ever but if no producer or theatre will touch it, it will never see the light of day.

Something of a mini-censorship furore has raised its ugly head recently over the production of Rita Sue and Bob Too which was due to play at the Royal Court in January. A few days ago it was announced that they were dropping the production, as it was co-directed by the once lauded, now disgraced Max Stafford-Clark. Mr Stafford-Clark has been accused of many instances of improper behaviour with cast members over the years; and as Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre from 1979 to 1993, it’s not hard to forge a link between him and his behaviour and the theatre itself.

No wonder emotions ran a little high; particularly as Rita Sue and Bob Too is a challenging play that depicts – there’s no two ways of saying this – a man regularly having sex with two fifteen-year-old girls. In 1982 when the play first appeared, that was illegal but many a blind eye was turned. Today, in our post-Operation Yewtree world, this is completely unacceptable; and in the Royal Court’s post-Stafford-Clark climate, where Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone has also been part of a major campaign against sexual harassment in the industry in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein shenanigans, she obviously felt that the play and the theatre did not sit well side by side. But only a few days later, this decision was reversed.

IMHO, society still hasn’t quite worked out what to do about paedophiles, so I think a good production of this play is a valuable tool in the discussion databank. There are many reasons why I applaud Vicky Featherstone’s decision to backtrack on dropping the play and reinstating it in the schedule. Censorship is never the answer. Just because you burn the books it doesn’t make the content go away. This is, indeed, a very good production, which I saw in Northampton in November. Why is it perfectly acceptable for the play to tour many provincial theatres around the UK, but for it suddenly to be too distasteful for the capital? Indeed, the Royal Court’s history of presenting avant garde theatre over the decades – its raison d’etre in many aspects – by rights ought to mean that there is nowhere more appropriate for the play to be staged. I bumped into the Chief Executive of the Royal and Derngate in Northampton shortly after we’d seen Rita Sue and Bob Too at his theatre and remarked on what a challenging play it is, in that we’re being asked to sympathise with a paedophile. His simple response was one of yes, it really makes you think and doesn’t theatre throw up some surprises sometimes. Which I think is absolutely the most rational reaction.

Added to which, the play’s writer, Andrea Dunbar, is no longer alive to defend her own work or to write more plays. Censorship of Rita Sue and Bob Too is effectively stifling what remains of her voice; a voice that came from the heart and described day-to-day life in her home town of Bradford in those depressing but unforgettable early Thatcher days. It would be a strange mixture of cowardly and cruel to extinguish her voice even further.

If Andrea Dunbar had written this play in the mid-1960s I am sure the Lord Chamberlain would have banned it outright, because of its display of promiscuous and underage sex. I could even imagine a case of obscenity being brought against it. The Theatres Act defines an obscene play as one likely to deprave and corrupt those likely to see it. Well, when I saw Rita Sue and Bob Too, the man in front of me was definitely getting carried away with the sexual frissons emanating from the stage, with shouts like “Go on, my son” and “I wish I had his job”. Had the play depraved and corrupted that man? That would be for a court to decide, but, personally, I think he was already three-quarters of the way there. Those days of stage censorship are long gone, let’s not resurrect them now.

Whilst I have your attention, gentle reader, next year I shall be launching a brand new, additional, site where I hope to take you through the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of stage censorship, looking at many examples of banned or heavily edited plays, the writers’ reactions, the effects on the plays themselves, the opinions of the public and the reviewers, the history of stage censorship and the progress towards its abolition. Please feel free to bookmark stagecensorship.com now – the About page is already written – and we will get going properly in January!