What the butler didn't see

POLITICS, PRUDERY AND PERVERSIONS: The Censoring of English Stage 1901-1968 by Nicholas de Jongh (Methuen, 16.99)

TOM DEWE MATHEWS

IT was a landmark day for English civil liberties. On 28 May, 1968 the House of Lords voted in the Theatres Bill which finally ended stage censorship in this country.

Yet many in authority mourned the passing of the Lord Chamberlain's blue pencil. To murmurs of approval from the red benches, the Chamberlain himself, Lord Cobbold, declared that he and his team of censors had carried out their duties "to the benefit of the public and of the theatre".

In this book, Nicholas de Jongh proves otherwise, not just through his revelation of previously unseen records from the Lord Chamberlain's Office, but also through his refusal to be deflected by any attempts at self-justification from the censor.

From its founding in 1735 to its abolition 233 years later, the actions of the Chamberlain's Office were draconian, to say the least. Any play that challenged or even posed a problem for the monarchy, the civil service or almost any other civil institution in Britain, was rejected or cut to the core. And it wasn't just Britain's status quo that concerned the censor.

Other nations' feelings also had to be taken into account: Germany's, for instance, when, on the eve of war, in 1939, Terence Rat-tigan's farce Follow My Leader was

submitted to the Nazi ambassador, Von Ribbentrop for approval. (It didn't get it and was banned). Not surprisingly, the casualty rate induced by such a cautious outlook affected every major ground- breaking play from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera - banned in 1735, through Ibsen's Ghosts - banned in 1891, up to Beckett's Waiting For Godot - cut in 1955.

George Bernard Shaw saw the impossibility of the situation when he said theatrical censorship was "doomed until a censor can be found greater than the greatest dramatists". There was not much hope of that when it was the monarch who appointed the Lord Chamberlain who, in turn, appointed his fellow censors from the upper ranks of the armed services.

To cut through the welter of official verbiage pouring from the pens of these military men takes a suit-

ably sharp pen, and this is where de Jongh comes into his own. A history of censorship is, after all, a roll call of the walking wounded or, even worse, the dead. It is a history of creative setbacks and, in order to get through this often acutely depressing tale, both the author and the reader need a sense of humour; and de Jongh, as this paper's drama critic, knows enough about farce to find the censor's funny bone.

A censor's report - issued from St James's Palace in 1953 - informs us that "The Lord Chamberlain objects in principle to the pulling of lavatory plugs"; or de Jongh will despair at the confusion caused among the courtier-censors by the arrival of the camp male in Nol Coward's 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet. Here a stage direction clearly states: "Four over-exquisitely dressed young men enter. They all wear in their immaculate buttonholes green carnations." Surely the Chamberlain's Office pondered whether this contravened the "total" ban on homosexuality? But the innocents at St James were completely oblivious to this campery - even when the "haughty, naughty" boys went into the refrain, "We believe in Art, though, we're poles apart. From the fools who are thrilled by Greuze.

We like Beardsley and Green Chartreuse". No, noted a nave censor, "There is very little to quarrel with".

POLITICS, Prudery and Perversions provides many such moments of revenge.

Indeed, as Joe Orton would say, it "kicks at the pricks". Essentially, though, this book is an exploration of how a censorship system is applied and in whose interest it is applied. Inevitably, on all too many occasions, the government was the unseen hand that guided the Chamberlain's pen; more surprisingly, perhaps, de Jongh reveals that the other major beneficiary of this unaccountable system was the monarchy. As members of the Court, the various Chamberlains cringed in horror at the very thought that their sovereign might be displeased by the goings-on on the stage. Material was supplied, and needle and thread immediately applied, when Queen Victoria expressed an "anxious interest" in the length of the ballerina's skirts during a performance of Offenbach's Vert-Vert in 1874.

Even more eccentrically, de Jongh notes King Lear was banned on and off during the on-off periods of George III's madness.

Taking his lead from England's social hierarchy, de Jongh concludes that our theatrical censorship - like all our forms of censorship - was a form of class war. It was born out of a middle- class fear of working people, out of a need for the theatre to become "respectable"; and, therefore, as soon as working people switched their allegiance from the stage to the cinema screen, and from there to the TV screen, the censor followed them. But the censor didn't just leave of his own accord. He had to be kicked off the stage and, if you want to know how this essential liberty was struck, you should read de Jongh's book.

* Tom Dewe Mathews is the author of Censored: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.