The Censorship of British Drama, Vol. 2: 1933-1952 (review)

The Censorship of British Drama is a three- volume series that explores the vast archive of the Lord Chamberlain's records of fifty-thousand individual files concerning every play submitted for a public performance licence. The relatively recent release of these documents provides a rich, multi-layered record for theatre historians interested in twentieth-century British drama. In this second volume, Steve Nicholson focuses on the difficulties experienced by the Lord Chamberlain's office as it responded to the social and political upheaval of World War II and of the immediate pre-war and post-war periods. Nicholson opens up new perspectives on plays whose significance in challenging and changing political and moral ideologies has been overlooked.

For this volume, Nicholson has also had access to previously unseen materials from the Royal Archive at Windsor Castle. The difficulty posed by this material resides in trying to identify fixed principles upon which decisions were made. To shape such a narrative would give the Lord Chamberlain's policies a clarity and consistency that, as Nicholson demonstrates, rarely existed in practice, as these were much less rigid than other books on this subject have suggested. So, instead, Nicholson draws out internal contradictions by charting the debates and arguments through which the Lord Chamberlain's policies and strategies evolved. Such analysis offers unprecedented insight into decision making which struggled to cohere with guidelines that were rarely formalized and were continually subject to interpretation.

Nicholson pays considerable attention to those plays that frequently tested the interpretation of vague, generic principles. Detailed analysis of individual case studies seems warranted, given that prolonged debates over a line of text or gesture reveal the ideological and moral forces at work within the Lord Chamberlain's office. It also highlights the pressures and influence brought to bear on the Lord Chamberlain's office by instruments of the British establishment. When faced with a raft of plays critical of the rise of Nazism, the Lord Chamberlain deferred to pressure from the Foreign Office, which was primarily concerned with maintaining cordial diplomatic relations with the German ambassador.

Debates on specific plays frequently challenged the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to separate the political from the moral. Such simplistic distinctions are repeatedly exposed by Nicholson's analysis of plays whose political and moral stances are impossible to separate. The rising tides of fascism, communism, and conservatism created a politically turbulent period, in which moral certainties were gradually giving way to doubts and anxieties. Perhaps the real achievement of this book is to situate the Lord Chamberlain's work within a rapidly changing social and cultural landscape. The pace and scale of the transformation taking place within Britain constantly left the Lord Chamberlain struggling to adapt policies and practices to the emerging environment.

The book balances its critique of the censorship of British theatre with recognition of the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to uphold "the justification that the stage had an inalienable right to reflect real life" (201). Decisions were frequently made in the full knowledge that, in the theatre, meaning is derived as much from the performance as from the approved texts. The gap between what appeared on the page and its eventual representation on the stage became ever wider, as playwrights and producers became more adept at codifying their intentions. Nicholson demonstrates that the real challenge to the Lord Chamberlain's authority and influence was played out as much through performance as through text.

Chapter one focuses on the depiction of the Nazis on the British stage. The second chapter explores the Lord Chamberlain's response to pressure exerted by the church and organizations such as the Public Morality Council, for whom the theatre's portrayal of decadence and depravity (for example, in Noel Coward's Design for Living) threatened the nation's sexual morality. Chapter three goes some way to redress the lack of scholarly work on the Lord Chamberlain's treatment of lesbianism. However, it is clear that the portrayal of...