The theatre is a watchword for unfettered artistic licence. Or is it?
Dramatists and producers still engage in battles with state censors — who
can still determine what is fitting for public consumption. The official
role of state censor, given to the Lord Chamberlain under the Licensing Act
1737, may well be dead — but censorship is alive and well in other guises.
It was the Licensing Act of 1737 that gave the Lord Chamberlain the role of
arbiter of theatrical taste. The role, held until 1968, was introduced by
the Prime Minister Robert Walpole to gag his theatrical critics, in
particular Henry Fielding, by banning any offensive reference to a living
person.
So from the 18th century every British playwright had to obtain a licence for
the public performance of a play. Any reference to homosexuality was taboo.
In 1958 the Lord Chamberlain acknowledged that “. . . homosexuality had been
so widely debated and written about that it was no longer justifiable to
continue its strict exclusion from the stage”. The concession did not
prevent his refusing a licence in 1966 for John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me:
the play ended with a drag ball and was deemed beyond the pale.
State censorship reigned unchallenged until the turn of the 19th century,
aided by the actor-managers who ran the theatres and were content to defer
to the censor to avoid prosecution. A growing recognition of the centrality
of the writer and arrival of subsidy for the theatre inspired a resistance
to censorship. The Royal Court productions of Edward Bond’s Saved, featuring
the notorious stoning of a baby in a pram, and Early Morning, which included
a lesbian affair between Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, were
instrumental in the censor’s demise.
Despite the successful prosecution of Saved in 1965 for an unlicensed club
production and the refusal of a licence for Early Morning, a performance of
the latter went ahead in 1967. By September 1968 the Theatres Act was in
force and the censor banished. Not so coincidentally, the musical Hair
opened that night in the West End.
The new Act’s test of obscenity, qualified by its “public good” defence,
became the only basis for theatre censorship and any prosecution required
the consent of the Attorney-General. British drama could at least enjoy free
rein — or could it?
The history of this battle between theatre and censorship is the subject of an
exhibition at the British Library. It records that a quiet period from 1968
to 1980 followed, until Mary Whitehouse’s private prosecution of Howard
Brenton’s The Romans in Britain at the Royal National Theatre. To dramatise
war crime the play included the scene of a young Druid priest being sexually
assaulted by a Roman soldier. The Attorney-General refused to prosecute
under the Theatres Act but a private prosecution of the play’s director
Michael Bogdanov was allowed. He was charged under the Sexual Offences Act
1956 with procuring (acting as a pimp) an act of gross indecency between two
actors. The case collapsed at the Old Bailey but this loophole remains open.
The Theatres Act is a relatively benign threat to the freedom of the
playwright, but “censorship” still comes in many forms such as
self-censorship born of fear, legal or political threats and a new age of
religious censorship.
In 1987 the Royal Court, in an act of self-censorship, submitted to pressure
and withdrew Ken Loach’s production of Jim Allen’s play Perdition. The play
dealt with the actions of a group of Hungarian Jews in 1944 alleged to have
co-operated with the Nazis in deporting Jews to further the aim of creating
a Jewish homeland.
Then in 2005 the Birmingham Repertory Theatre was forced by Sikh protesters to
halt production of Khaur Bhatt’s play Behzti that featured a rape scene in a
Sikh temple. In the same year Howard Brenton was again unsuccessfully
targeted by Christian groups for his play Paul about the life of St Paul.
Jerry Springer the Opera, with its treatment of Judaeo-Christian themes and
portrayal of Christ as gay, attracted protests from Christian groups during
its theatre run but it was its exposure to a wide audience by the screening
on BBC Two in 2005 that attracted 55,000 complaints and an unsuccessful High
Court attempt to prosecute the Director-General of the BBC for blasphemy.
Critics have also played a part. In 1995, Sarah Kane was subjected to a
bilious onslaught by critics for her play Blasted (now a modern classic),
comparable with the attack on Bond for Saved. Kane had questioned the
morality of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia: critics disapproved of
her dramatic use of violence and accused her of glamorising it. One
dismissed the play as “this disgusting feast of filth”.
The respected critic Irving Wardle lamented the loss of great work through
self-censorship. Nick Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre,
recently observed that “our job in the theatre is to put on shows that will
provoke, ridicule and offend”. John Osborne said: “Life is offensive” when
rebuked for the offensive content of one of his plays. Indeed, it can be;
and today the reality of Iraq and Abu Ghraib resonates with Brenton and
Kane’s dramatisations.
The real and present threat — and new insidious censor — comes from the
irresistible rise of religious fundamentalism and the pressure imposed by
minority groups. A play’s content may not offend the law but its treatment
of religion or other related issues, however real and accurate, may risk
incurring the zealot’s ire to such a degree — take the production of Bezhti
— that serious consideration has to be given to withdrawing its performance,
so as to avoid exposing the theatre’s actors, staff and audience to the risk
of harm from a violent reaction to its perceived offensive content.
It is a worrying interference with the continuing development over the past 40
years of society’s greater tolerance of the dramatisation on the stage of
controversial and important issues.
The Golden Generation, British Theatre 1945-1968 — until November 30
at the British Library.
The author is senior partner at Simons Muirhead & Burton and chairman
of the Royal Court Theatre
