1968 Oppression of the stage in Britain has almost as long a history as Britain itself. The church has traditionally conceived theatrical performance as more dangerous than literature. Audiences (unlike solitary readers) are ‘crowds’ and crowds easily become rebellious mobs.
The Puritans, after their victory in the Civil War, put down all public drama as work of the devil. Even after the Restoration, Charles II (an inveterate lover of the theatre and its orange girls) extended ‘Patents’ (i.e. licences) to only two theatres: Sir Thomas Killigrew’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Sir William Davenant’s Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Unroyal theatres did not qualify.
In the 18th century, licensing of the national theatre came officially into the domain of the Lord Chamberlain, a dignitary in the royal household charged with matters of protocol, civil order and state occasions. The Chamberlain delegated theatrical matters to his deputy – ‘the examiner of plays’. That such an office existed chilled creativity. Early plays to be banned were Gustavus Vasa (1739) by Henry Brooke, and Edward and Eleonora (1739) by James Thomson – both on grounds of their political content – innocuous though it was. For theatre managers and proprietors it was enough, as with the Inquisition, to ‘show the instruments’. Self-censorship did the Lord Chamberlain’s work for him.
Censorship was refined by the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843. As ‘licenser’ of plays, and theatres, the Lord Chamberlain now required every script to be physically deposited with him, scrutinised, corrected (if necessary) and cleared before performance.
As the 19th century progressed – particularly with the arrival of ‘Ibsenism’ – friction rose. It reached a head in 1894 when the Lord Chamberlain declined to license (even with modifications) George Bernard Shaw’s third play, Mrs Warren’s Profession.
In this drama of ideas, Shaw wittily portrayed prostitution and brothel-keeping (neither word features in the text) as ‘rational’ alternatives to marriage that enabled women to make economic use of their sexuality. Women, Shaw wrote, were driven to the streets for the same reason that prize-fighters were driven to the ring. The playwright was an admirer of pugilism (he conducted, later in life, an interesting correspondence with the world heavyweight champion – and intellectual – Gene Tunney).
In Shaw’s play the young heroine, Viv Warren, a Girton Girl, has grown up in ignorance of her mother’s ‘profession’. After the initial shock, she disowns the family, discards her lover, and becomes a wholly independent woman. The last image the audience has of her is methodically doing her accounts.
The ‘King’s Reader’ (as Shaw called him) argued that the play offended by not depicting the ‘loathsomeness’ of prostitution. Shaw assumed that his more serious offence was failing to render the subject at all ‘aphrodisiac’. Perversely, if Mrs Warren’s Profession had been either more horrific or more erotic it would have been more presentable. It was the naked analysis (sex is as saleable a commodity as cabbage) that was objectionable.
Shaw’s larger contention (as in his first play, Widowers’ Houses) was that the British middle classes all live on immoral earnings – the more immoral since they blind themselves to the fact.
After the ban, Shaw promptly published Mrs Warren’s Profession (with a lengthy introduction and voluminous stage directions) as one of his ‘Plays Unpleasant’. The play was eventually staged on 5 January 1902, at London’s New Lyric Club. Such ‘closed’ events, with member-only audiences, were immune from the Lord Chamberlain’s authority.
It was a victory of sorts. But Shaw, the greatest British playwright of the 20th century, would be destined to work out his half-century career under the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship: duelling all the way.
Mrs Warren’s Profession was finally permitted public performance on 27 July 1925, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Birmingham. Shaw surmised that the authorities had been shamed into letting it through by their own exploitation of women’s labour in factories during the First World War. He was not triumphant. The 1925 performance was, he felt, too late. Mrs Warren’s Profession was now historically irrelevant.
The play had a similarly fraught passage to acceptability in the US. On 27 October 1905 its American premiere in New Haven, Connecticut (one of the routine preludes to Broadway production) was shut down by the local mayor after its first night. The same thing happened three days later when the play opened in New York. The whole cast, crew and management of the Garrick Theater were charged with ‘offences against public decency’. It was not until 9 March 1907 that Mrs Warren’s Profession was permitted unhindered public performance.
The club loophole was increasingly used as the 20th century progressed, and British drama chafed under the nonsense of state control. The play that is credited with finally abolishing ‘royal’ censorship of the stage was Edward Bond’s Saved, featuring as it did the stoning to death of a baby on stage. The Lord Chamberlain banned public performance. The Royal Court (the theatre that had pioneered ‘new’ British drama) promptly reconfigured itself as a club and staged a performance on 3 November 1965. The play provoked furious discussion in the press and media. Following Roy Jenkins’ Obscene Publications Act five years earlier (and the ground-breaking Lady Chatterley acquittal), the interference on the creative arts of Britain by this ermined flunkey appeared absurd. The Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship was abolished by the Theatres Act, which came into force on 26 September 1968.
Interestingly, however, the act retained a clause requiring that every play, publicly performed in the UK, should have its pre-production script deposited at the British Library. This archive survives as the shadow of centuries-long censorship of the stage.