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If You Can Remember the 1960s . . . 
You’re Old

If any two historical patterns can be said to have converged to create the climate in which The Rocky Horror Show could flourish, in Britain in the early 1970s, it was the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, and the decision, less than a year later, to open British theater up to the most modernizing trends and influences.

The former had been a very long time coming. An entire decade had elapsed since the government-commissioned Wolfenden Report first recommended that society acknowledge homosexuality as something that wasn’t a nasty little disease and begin treating gays (as they weren’t yet popularly known) as legitimate members of society.

At the time, the report was all but suppressed. Its findings were published, a blue paperbound volume, 155 pages in length, price five shillings (about seventy cents), and portentously titled The Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. And it was well read. The initial printing of five thousand copies sold out within hours of publication, and its contents were debated from one end of that moist little island to the other.

By an almighty fourteen votes to one, the committee headed by academic John Wolfenden recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”; while reminding the authorities that “the law’s function is to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious, and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others.” It was not, on the other hand, designed “to intervene in the private life of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular pattern of behavior.”

The great and the good flocked to Wolfenden’s side. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher; the British Medical Association; the Howard League for Penal Reform; and the National Association of Probation Officers all applauded and approved of the Committee’s findings.

But not the government and not, for the most part, the media. The Daily Mail feared that “perverts” would be free “to spread corruption” throughout the land. The Daily Express called the report “cumbersome nonsense”; its Sunday Express sister condemned “the Pansies Charter.” And The Daily Telegraph essentially warned that unfettered homosexuality would be as virulent as the plague, and that only the law restrained the average British male from diving headlong into a pit of same-sex debauchery.

Emboldened by such hostility; relievedly muttering that the general public was not yet ready for male homosexuals to be let loose on the streets (female homosexuality had never been prohibited); the government of the day effectively ignored the report. And, in so doing, ensured that it would be another ten years before the laws that governed sexual behavior were amended (at least in England and Wales. It would be thirteen years more, 1980, before the same freedoms were introduced to Scotland).

Sing if You’re Glad to Be Gay

So, 1967 was “the big year for buggery,” as one still-dissenting media voice rather indelicately put it. But still there were restrictions. Homosexuality remained illegal among serving members of the military and the merchant navy, while the age of homosexual consent was set at twenty-one, five years above the heterosexual limit. Not until 1994 would it be reduced to eighteen, before falling finally to sixteen in 2000.

Neither was the bill’s passage through society an easy one. A decade after decriminalization, homophobia remained sufficiently rampant that punk-era singer and activist Tom Robinson was moved to write the anthemic “Glad to be Gay,” commenting not only on public attitudes toward homosexuality, but on those that were barely disguised by the media and the police force. Like he sang in the song, “the buggers are legal now, what more are they after?”

Five years before that, however, in 1972, the British music scene was riven by a movement that was as bold and brash as punk could ever be, and whose very raison d’être appeared to be the acceptance of, if not a wholesale embrace of, the gay lifestyle.

It was a garishly painted caricature of one, to be sure. Few people looking at the likes of David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust face paint, or the Sweet’s Steve Priest, togged up as a camp Nazi stormtrooper, ever thought that these men might go to the grocery store dressed like that.

But when Bowie announced he was gay in a January 1972 magazine interview, it does not matter whether or not he was simply angling for press attention (as he has subsequently claimed). At the time, both in word and deed, he was eminently believable.

It would be another year before Lou Reed’s song “Make Up” unequivocally claimed “now we’re coming out . . . out of our closet.” Two years before Elektra Records attempted to launch Jobriath as the world’s first openly homosexual rock star. Four years before Elton John told Rolling Stone that he was bisexual, and that “there’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex.”

But as 1972 oozed slowly into 1973, anybody taking the communal British pulse would have noted that it was certainly more elevated than usual. And in some very questioning ways, as well.

Glam rock (which we will be looking at in greater depth later, incidentally) was not acting alone, however. Mainstream theater, too, had suddenly grasped the permissive nettle, too—or at least it had finally been permitted to.

You Can’t Do That Onstage

For over two centuries, since 1737, every word and deed that was played out on a British stage appeared there by the kind permission of the Lord Chamberlain of the Household—the senior officer of the Royal Household, the man (it was always a man) held responsible for supporting and advising the monarch in all matters pertaining to state. Including its moral well-being.

It was a role that the office had held since the passage of the Licensing Act, an almost Draconian governmental attempt to rein in what was widely regarded as an utterly out-of-control artistic community.

Out of control as in questioning, querulous, seditious, rebellious.

No play or musical could be performed on any stage in the kingdom without the Lord Chamberlain’s office having first read and approved it. And why? Because “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum [and] the public peace so to do.”

Because, in 1730-something, the incumbent prime minister, Robert Walpole, finally decided that he was sick and tired of playwrights and players mocking his government, his decisions and his friends, holding them up to ridicule and calling them out for all the bullshit they spouted.

And because, in particular, he was sick and tired of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, a production that might even be termed the Rocky Horror of its day.

It was state censorship, plain and simple, an artistically stultifying and creatively abhorrent ruling that wasn’t simply written into law, but was to remain there for close to the next 250 years. And this is how it began.

John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera

Born in 1685, John Gay was already a moderately successful playwright and poet long before Beggar’s Opera granted him immortality. But he was a struggling one as well, particularly after he lost all he had earned in the so-called South Sea Bubble of 1721—a financial collapse so vast and far-reaching that it made more recent stock exchange calamities seem like hiccups by comparison.

A decade later, Gay was still struggling to get back on his feet when essayist Jonathan Swift happened to remark that an opera set among the criminal classes of contemporary England “might make an odd, pretty sort of thing.”

Gay set to work writing such a thing, but not necessarily for its oddness or prettiness. He wrote, too, to try and reclaim the stage from the interminable Italian operas that were then so much in vogue, so utterly incomprehensible to the average man, and so absolutely irrelevant to the common.

Beggar’s Opera was not an immediately popular offering. Where Italian opera rejoiced in doe-eyed beauties, sinister aristocrats, star-crossed lovers and all the other paraphernalia of its breed, Beggar’s Opera took a highwayman for its hero, a slattern for its love interest, the law for its villain and a thinly disguised caricature of Prime Minister Walpole for a minor crook.

The jailer was corrupt, the system was warped, even the Thief Taker—essentially a private detective who made his living by catching criminals and turning them over to the authorities—was himself supplementing his income by fencing for the thieves themselves.

Beggar’s Opera is described, with no exaggeration, as the first true English opera, and, as such, it should have been welcomed. But it was also a vicious assault on the government of the day, a queer, twisted fable whose most obvious implications were offensive enough, but whose deeper meanings verged upon the libelous.

The rich, the powerful and the aristocratic of the age all parade through the scenes; suitably disguised, of course, but obvious to all. And there they are stripped of their dignity and their wealth, shorn of all their fine houses and finer clothes, and then pummeled and pilloried into the drab uniforms and stark walls of the gin house and the jail.

As a political satire, Beggar’s Opera was a powerful creation. As social comment, it was as sharp as a sword. According to the law of the day, if a pickpocket lifted as little as a shilling from your pocket, he had committed a capital crime.

So why should he not kill you as well, to lessen the chances of subsequent identification?

If he stole five shillings from your shop, or forty from your house, those, too, were crimes that merited the death penalty. So he might as well wreck the shop or burn the house, and woe betide any who witnessed his deeds.

The opera did not demand that criminals be allowed to get away with their misdeeds unpunished. It did, however, recommend that the law show a little common sense—which, as we continue to see on our streets today, is not always a suggestion that goes down well.

In an age when opera was regarded as the highest form of art available, Beggar’s Opera showed off the lowest forms of life, and the first two theaters to whom it was offered had no hesitation in rejecting it.

But Gay, despite his straitened circumstances, had allies in high places. The Duchess of Queensbury was a firm admirer, and she prevailed upon impresario John Rich to stage it at his newly opened theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728.

It was an immediate success. But it was not for the caricatures of Sir Robert Walpole and his cabinet of political miscreants that the people, the common people, the very people whose existences Gay had borrowed, went to see it. Nor was it to hear enacted on stage the very same complaints that they themselves uttered daily.

It was to see their own reflection on the stage.

Not everybody who attended Beggar’s Opera throughout its various runs was, or even pretended to be, as black as the villains therein. Even in the vilest slums and grimmest rookeries of the city, there were people who considered themselves to be honest, god-fearing, upright citizens.

The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s study of life at the lower end of the social spectrum. A Scene from The Beggar’s Opera by William Hogarth, 1728.

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

But still Beggar’s Opera touched upon, and reflected, every life in the metropolis; and every life, it seemed, then turned out first to witness it, and then to celebrate it. From the lowest to the highest, Beggar’s Opera contained a warning, or a reminder, or an invitation.

Audiences swelled. They dressed as their favorite cast members, they shouted out responses to the words being spoken on stage. They danced and caroused in the aisles while the play played on; and when the final curtain fell, they retired to the taverns, or onto the streets, to continue enacting the opera’s finest moments.

Monied young hoodlums, known to the media of the day as Mohocks, marched in gangs through Regency London, the words of Gay’s bawdy opera foaming on their sneering lips. An apparent and sudden increase in crime was laid at Beggar’s Opera’s doorstep, and an upsurge in drunkenness and licentious behavior.

And it was unstoppable. Beggar’s Opera opened on January 29, 1728, before what one contemporary report described as a “prodigious concourse of Nobility and gentry” (Prime Minister Walpole himself was present in a side box); and afterwards, the Daily Journal opined, “No Theatrical Performance for these many years has met with so much Applause.”

Beggar’s Opera ran uninterrupted until March 9, breaking every previous theatrical record, and is said to have earned Gay over £800. Indeed, a popular maxim of the day claimed Beggar’s Opera “made Gay rich and the producer, Rich, gay.”

Thereafter, there was to be at least one run of performances taking place every single year for nigh on a century, and only a handful less over the course of another. When it was revived in 1920, it again broke all records. And it is still present today, in Brecht/Weill’s free adaptation, The Threepenny Opera, published exactly two hundred years after Gay’s masterpiece itself first appeared on the stage, and which has attracted entertainers from every walk of life.

Yet, for all its fashionable popularity, the average performance of Beggar’s Opera was no place for the well-to-do, or even the well dressed, not unless they were accustomed to the brawling, boozy surroundings of the darkened streets outside. And, no matter how highly the critics praised it, and the lower classes applauded it, clearly there was no doubt (at least among the upper classes) that Beggar’s Opera was having a disastrous effect on the morals of the lower orders.

With all that in mind, it seems astonishing that no attempt was made to simply ban the beast outright.

Or maybe not.

The government of the day wasted little time in condemning Beggar’s Opera.

It was corrupting, it was dangerous, it was sick. The satire, if such there was within it (and the authorities refused to publicly acknowledge their own personal contribution to the play’s moral standpoint), was so obscure and so dark that it was lost on the majority of viewers, who saw simply the revels of the lawless, and all the joys such revelries entailed.

But to ban the play would seem petty . . . vindictive even. It would hold the authorities up to even greater ridicule than they were already being subjected to, and would give their enemies, political and otherwise, still further ammunition to sling at them.

It would prove that this ghastly stage show had been correct all along.

So a secondary course of action was taken. No play would be banned, no playwright would be outlawed. Beggar’s Opera could play on wherever it wished.

All the government required was the chance to look over any new productions that were planned for British theaters and maybe suggest a few minor changes. Little tweaks. Nothing you’d even notice, really. And to prove it wasn’t even an overtly political act, the gig was given to the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Grafton. He worked for the king as much as for the politicians, and all he was concerned about was to ensure that society continued ticking along.

There. That’s really not so bad, is it?

It was left to Gay himself to inform the reading public of the decision, in the preface to the first edition of his sequel to Beggar’s Opera, Polly, in early 1728—nine full years before it was enacted as law, but in plenty of time to outlaw Polly itself.

Every thing was ready for a rehearsal [when] the Lord Chamberlain sent an order from the country to prohibit Mr. Rich to suffer any Play to be rehearsed upon his stage till it had been first of all supervised by his Grace. I desir’d to have the honour of reading the Opera to his Grace, but he order’d me to leave it with him, which I did upon expectation of having it return d on the Monday following, but I had it not ’till Thursday December 12, when I received it from his Grace with this answer; that it was not allowed to be acted, but commanded to be supprest.

The Dark Ages were coming.

Mary had a little bear, to which she was so kind. I often see her bear in front, but not her . . .

Unsurprisingly—or at least, unsurprisingly to everybody except for the government itself—British theater never accepted officialdom’s self-ordained right to dictate what could and couldn’t be performed on stage.

No sooner had the ruling been instituted than the first complaining voices were raised, and barely a year went by thereafter without some playwright or company setting out to push the Lord Chamberlain’s tolerance as far as it could.

It would continue to do so, at home and abroad.

Beggar’s Opera ignited a trend in what we would now call “audience participation,” reawakening traditions that would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s generation, but that had faltered in the century or so since the Bard. Now it was to falter again; the Lord Chamberlain saw to that.

Of course, attempts were constantly being made to find loopholes in the legislation.

In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the Windmill Theatre in London’s Soho district became famed for its nude dancing shows, and that had to be against the law, didn’t it? No, not if the ladies in question stood in shadow and refrained from moving a muscle. As dancer Polly Perkins told the BBC in 2015, “The Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t allow a nude person to move in a theatre, so you had to stand very still.”

Still, audiences took what they could get. Perkins continued, “A lot of people—well, they were all men—they’d stay the whole bloody day sometimes, with either a newspaper or a bowler hat on their knee; I’ll say no more.”

Neither was the Lord Chamberlain concerned solely with what was being done on stage. What was said, too, came in for prudish scrutiny, and so a whole new comedic vernacular developed, a world of increasingly crude double entendres that first flourished through the golden age of the music halls in the late Victorian age and into the early twentieth century, but which became so firmly entrenched that it remained the bedrock of British humor until at least the 1980s. It is frequently said that British sexual humor was based on little more than smut and innuendo, and this is very true. But when the law prevents anything else, what is the alternative?

To stop laughing altogether?

Neither did the removal of those restrictions change that, because cultural mores do not change overnight. A large-breasted woman standing in front of a produce stand, her breasts resting on a pile of melons, was going to get as many laughs in the late 1960s as she did a century before, particularly if a shortsighted gent holding a baguette reached out to give one a squeeze.

Fans of television’s Are You Being Served in the seventies (and beyond) were as delighted by the animal-loving Mrs. Slocombe’s regular references to her pussy as admirers of 1930s comedian Max Miller thrilled when he told the tale of the girl who swallowed a pin when she was eighteen “but didn’t feel a prick till she was twenty-one.”

Even the word “titter,” if deployed correctly, could render an entire generation helpless with laughter. Or at least tittering.

The Rocky Horror Show adhered to these traditions as firmly as any other production of the age. And why? Because they were traditions.

“You’re wet.”

Controversy on a Hot Tin Roof

In terms of a concerted drive to finally rid the arts of this increasingly absurd anachronism, it was 1957 (the same year, it will be noted, that the Wolfenden Committee published its report) before a truly focused campaign got under way, with the realization that there was one way around the law. The Lord Chamberlain acted only against plays intended for the general public. He was powerless to intervene against those staged in private.

So when he outlawed the Comedy Theatre’s proposed production of American playwright Arthur Miller’s A View from a Bridge, on the grounds of its homosexual content, the theater announced the creation of a private members club, the New Watergate Club (in the years before the word “Watergate” took on its now familiar, ominous connotations).

There, members could enjoy plays that were considered unsuitable for the general public, and around thirteen thousand would-be members immediately flocked to the Comedy’s portals. The Lord Chamberlain, however, remained unmoved by such a show of popularity. A year later, another American import, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was likewise prohibited, and for much the same reason as the Miller play: because it mentioned homosexuality.

Even by the Lord Chamberlain’s customary standards, however, this one was a ridiculous decision. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a major Broadway sensation, and widely regarded among the theatrical triumphs of the postwar era. In 1955, it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, while running for 694 performances on Broadway.

Sadly, Stateside success was seldom regarded as a sign of civilization in the upper reaches of British society; rather, according to the highest echelons, “our American cousins” were more likely directly responsible for the decline in moral standards that made people even want to see such plays in the first place.

“B-Movies.” “Rock ’n’ Roll.” “Teenagers.” “Coca Cola.” Enter any gentleman’s club in London in the late 1950s; open any newspaper of the age, or any private government memorandum, and you could feel the disdain oozing out. Besides, if the good Lord had intended automobiles to have fins, He’d have called them fish.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was placed under the exact same prohibition as A View from a Bridge, and would suffer the same fate, too—a limited engagement before the private membership of the New Watergate Club. Except it wasn’t so limited, and it wasn’t so exclusive.

Buoyed by the publicity surrounding this latest censorial absurdity, membership of the club had swollen by almost 500 percent. The media, too, was howling for the Lord Chamberlain to at least show some lenience, and, finally, the censor finally backed down. The mere mention of homosexuality was no longer regarded as a reason to ban a play.

A battle was won, but the war was not over. Through the 1960s, through the heyday of Swinging London, and both the cultural and artistic erosion of so many of the restrictions that had hitherto dogged the other arts, the Lord Chamberlain held tight to his powers.

Neither did he do so single-handedly. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II supported the legislation; so did the socialist prime minister Harold Wilson (elected 1964); so, of course, did the Lord Chamberlain himself, at this time a sexagenarian banker (and former governor of the Bank of England) impressively named Cameron Fromanteel Cobbold, 1st Baron Cobbold.

The tide of public opinion, however, was against them. There were too many influential voices being raised against the law; and too many absurd prosecutions being brought against the arts.

Critic and commentator Kenneth Tynan was a furiously outspoken opponent; so was veteran actor Laurence Olivier.

Even the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, one of London’s most prestigious venues, had reacted against the censor after one prohibition too many, opening its own private club in 1965 in order to produce John Osborne’s “sexually transgressive” A Patriot for Me—the story of a high-ranking Austro-Hungarian secret service agent who is blackmailed by the Russians over his homosexuality, and which climaxes with both a suicide and a drag ball.

John Osborne, father of the Angry Young Men movement, at the Royal Court Theatre following the controversial success of Look Back in Anger.

© Daily Mail/Rex/Alamy Stock Photo

Of course, the government did not simply sit back and allow its enemies to rage against it. In 1966, the Royal Court Theatre again hit the headlines when the producers of Edward Bond’s banned play Saved were prosecuted for obscenity, and that despite it being performed only to a private audience.

The prosecution failed, but still it was a hard-fought battle before, in 1968, An Act to abolish censorship of the theatre and to amend the law in respect of theatres and theatrical performances was finally agreed upon.

On September 26, 1968, this new Theatres Act became law. From now on, public taste, and not the idealized morality of some fictional, sexless golden age, would be the primary arbiter of a play’s suitability, and British theatre could at last begin to embrace a new age, and fresh freedoms.

Twenty four hours later . . . .