The London Stage: Exit The Censor

THE LONDON STAGE

For more than three centuries, one man had despotic power to decide what plays would or would not appear on the public stage in Britain. As the royal censor, the Lord Chamberlain could summarily order an offending word, line or scene stricken from a script, or he could ban a play altogether by refusing to license it for performance. Although blue-penciling has eased in recent years, English playwrights have persistently demanded total dramatic freedom, and last July Parliament abolished the Chamberlain’s licensing authority. Two weeks ago, the U.S. folk-rock musical Hair became the first play publicly staged in London without a censor’s license since the beginning of the 17th century.

The end of official censorship was greeted with rejoicing by the London theater; last week there was a mock-serious funeral service for the royal censor in Chelsea. Meanwhile, Hair’s actors executed what one critic called “a triumphal dance over the grave of the Lord Chamberlain.” High time. With offices in the Palace of St. James’s, the Lord Chamberlain is the senior officer of the royal household. Yet he and his four readers have also played the role of arbiters of public taste, passing judgment on some 800 new scripts each year. Their esthetic qualifications have been uncertain at best. The present Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobbold, 64, is a former governor of the Bank of England. Cobbold is generally respected for his liberal views on what is dramatically permissible, but many of his predecessors have been less enlightened. George Bernard Shaw once complained that the Lord Chamberlain “robs, insults, and suppresses me as if he were the Czar of Russia. I must submit in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document [the license] which I cannot read without boiling of the blood.”

Godless Actors. England’s play censorship was established during the 16th century in order to stamp out Catholic stage resistance to the Reformation, as well as to protect the people from the bad influence of actors, who were generally held to be godless degenerates. Licensing became an official duty of the Chamberlain in 1737, when Prime Minister Robert Walpole grew so outraged by the political lampoons of Henry Fielding that he forced through a new censorship law. Since then, the Lords Chamberlain have had unchallengeable authority to ban plays by Ibsen (Ghosts), Shaw (Mrs. Warren’s Profession), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Arthur Miller (A View From the Bridge) and Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). The most notable modern playwright to run afoul of the Lord Chamberlain is John Osborne. One of his plays dealing with homosexuality, A Patriot For Me, was banned entirely;* almost every one of his scripts has had to be heavily laundered before the censor would give his approval.

There may be some unexpected hazards in London’s new stage freedom. The Lord Chamberlain’s approval once virtually guaranteed a play immunity from lawsuits. But with that protection gone, playwrights face a bewildering maze of common-law provisions against obscenity, sedition, blasphemy and libel, not to mention a recent law against inciting racial hatred. Paradoxically, the end of licensing could lead to new restrictions, imposed by theater owners worried about possible prosecutions.

Hairy Filth. Still, most authors would rather see the Lord Chamberlain concentrate on his other duties, such as arranging Buckingham Palace garden parties and caring for the royal swans. In London’s West End, arrangements are now being made to bring back such once banned plays as Jean-Claude van Itahe’s America Hurrah and Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers. “We are at last released from the tyranny of the theatrical leaseholder,” says Osborne dryly. “There will probably be a quick rash of hairy American filth, but it shouldn’t threaten the existence of cheerful, decent, serious British filth.”

* Like many forbidden dramas, it was later performed privately at one of London’s “theater clubs,” which were exempt from the licensing laws.