The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968. Volume Four: The Sixties by Steve Nicholson (review)

The final volume of Steve Nicholson’s history of the pre-censorship of drama in Britain since 1900 covers the “prolonged and sometimes agonised death-throes” (5) of the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. The absurdities of many of the censors’ judgments are familiar from previous polemics and studies as are the lists of required omissions and alterations formerly printed in plays from the period. Nicholson includes plenty of these but also shows how the Lords Chamberlain struggled to reconcile the claims of common sense, consciousness of the rapidly-changing social climate, and established rules of conduct. This makes for a consistently engrossing, entertaining and sometimes hilarious narrative. Nicholson points out that “there are times when the Lord Chamberlain and his Comptroller and Assistant Comptroller seem to have been fuelled more by a sense of obligation to fulfill their obligations than by a real commitment to the cause” (2), but there are also episodes in which the zeal of a subordinate had to reined in.

Viewed from the Court of Saint James’s the theatre sometimes seemed dominated by reckless, if not actually wicked individuals. There was often anxiety that a play or its production might encourage the wrong passions in the wrong sort of people: the stoning of the baby in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) might (in the words of one reader) “be a direct incentive to some of the sub-humans who now associate in gangs” should similar scenes appear before “a different type of audience” from that at the Royal Court (7). Another reader dismissed Saved as “a revolting amateur play by one of those dramatists who write as it comes to them out of a heightened image of their experience. It is about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs with so little individuality that it is difficult to distinguish between them” (156). Sometimes the effect of the reader’s response amounts with hindsight to a classic case of not getting it. In 1960 the first submitted script for the satirical stage revue Beyond the Fringe was “a tatty little pseudo-intellectual revue, full of tiny mental jokes” (43). On the other hand Jean Genet himself might have relished elements of the view of The Screens as “an enormous, sprawling, vaguely symbolic play by a self-confessed criminal and pervert . . . preoccupied with anal eroticism” (107). Even the revival of plays from before the office’s jurisdiction could produce apoplectic responses: a student production of Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance was a sign of “a backwash from the Royal Court, which induces the young at universities to rake over the sexual muck-heaps of history” (184).

Sympathetic treatment of, or reference to, homosexuality might be a means of recruitment, so that John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me (Royal Court, 1965) looked like “a Pansies’ Charter of Freedom”. Christopher Hampton’s first play, When Did You Last See My Mother? (Royal Court, 1966) was in any case “a dreadful little amateur drama” about “two grubby undergraduates . . . obsessed with smut,” evidencing “homo-sexual [sic] leanings”, and called for careful watch to be kept on its “unspeakable little author” (191). In internal correspondence about US, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s devised piece about the Vietnam War directed by Peter Brook in 1966, Lord Nugent, a retired Comptroller, advised reassuringly that in his opinion audiences at the Aldwych were “usually the same, very left wing beardies”, so that by “preaching to the converted” the performance was unlikely to win many new recruits for “the anti-Americans” (204). Such anxieties regarding political interventions of any degree of radicalism were an adjunct to the familiar strictures: against impersonations of living persons, especially members of the Royal Family (past and present) and British politicians or foreign heads of state; the safeguarding of morals in respect to sexuality; protection against the encouragement by example to violent crime; prevention of actual or implicit blasphemy; and (in some instances...