The Censorship of British Drama 1900-1968 Volume 4: The Sixties

by Steve Nicholson

Overview

Winner of the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize – 2016

This is the final volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson’s definitive four-volume survey of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material, covering the period 1960-1968. This brings to its conclusion the first comprehensive research on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives for the 20th century. The 1960s was a significant decade in social and political spheres in Britain, especially in the theatre. As certainties shifted and social divisions widened, a new generation of theatre makers arrived, ready to sweep away yesterday’s conventions and challenge the establishment. Analysis exposes the political and cultural implications of a powerful elite exerting pressure in an attempt to preserve the veneer of a polite, unquestioning society.

This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/TGOJ9339

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780859899888
Publisher:	University of Exeter Press
Publication date:	07/29/2015
Series:	Exeter Performance Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	366
File size:	869 KB

About the Author

Steve Nicholson is Emeritus Professor of 20th-Century and Contemporary Theatre, and Director of Drama, in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. He is a series editor for Exeter Performance Studies and the author of British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917-1945, also published by UEP.

Steve Nicholson is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield. He is a series editor for Exeter Performance Studies and the author of British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917-1945, also published by UEP.

 

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The Censorship of British Drama 1900â"1968

Volume Four: The Sixties

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By Steve Nicholson

University of Exeter Press

Copyright © 2015 Steve Nicholson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-988-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Inflamed Appendix (1960–1961)

Ten years ago plays used to be submitted of every sort and kind: now there seems to be nothing between the pregnant sluts at the kitchen sink and waffling morons in the Tudorbethan Lounge Hall.

All we can do is try and keep the dirt from getting dirtier.

The Assistant Comptroller at St James's Palace in 1961 who so generously found the time to assist a Colonel's sixth-form daughter with her essay on theatre censorship was the recently appointed and rather dashing fortyfour- year-old Lieutenant Eric Charles William Mackenzie Colonel Penn. On his recent retirement from the army, Penn had been parachuted into the powerful position of Assistant Comptroller to the Lord Chamberlain, replacing Norman Gwatkin, who had been smoothly airlifted into the post of Comptroller when Sir Terence Nugent was retired to his hangar in August 1960. Nugent, in turn, was rewarded with a peerage for his thirty years of service to the Royal Family, which had included twentyfour overseeing the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The Earl of Scarbrough had been in post since 1952, and the Office still seemed to be in secure and experienced hands; even the new boy was a product of Eton and Cambridge, and the Queen and her Mother had both attended his Mayfair wedding. As one newspaper noted of Penn: 'on the social side he cannot be faulted'. At St James's, the Lieutenant would become a byword for 'organisational ability' and his 'producer's eye in planning and executing ceremonial occasions'; he was reportedly at his best doing weddings and funerals. But Britain was changing — and so too the theatre — and Penn was about to come under attack.

Fings

The late 1950s are sometimes identified as a time when the domination of the cultural mainstream by cut-glass accents and the frivolities and anxieties of the wealthy middle-classes was challenged by writers such as John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney. While the reality was more complex, it is certainly true that the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East's Theatre Royal did represent aspects of society which had until then been largely ignored. As Littlewood herself put it:

In the theatre of those dear departed days when every actress had roses round the vowels, and a butler's suit was an essential part of an actor's equipment, the voice of the Cockney was one long whine of blissful servitude. No play was complete without its moronic maid or faithful batman — rich with that true cockney speech and humour learned in the drama schools.

The new voices and attitudes inevitably created pressure for the Censorship, and for the theatregoers and critics of yesteryear. As one of the latter asked in despair:

Do the modern audiences genuinely demand stage characters of the type seen only when a garden stone is kicked aside — crawling, bestial things, found in the lowest dives and in the doorways of Soho alleys, cringing, filthy characters with no morals and no loyalties. To whom prison is a second home?

The question was general, but the specific play which had prompted Bill Boorne's anger and exasperation was Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be, as revived by the Earl of Scarbrough's longtime adversary, Theatre Workshop.

Eric Penn had arrived at St James's a war-time hero, having been awarded the Military Cross for leading a successful and surprise preemptive night-time attack on a German machine-gun position in Italy. But it was probably a mistake to launch a similar assault against Theatre Workshop so soon after he arrived. He was not yet versed in the rules of engagement or the more subtle guerrilla tactics generally employed, and he underestimated the strength and power of his enemies. Moreover, Penn had little experience of working in the face of black propaganda from a hostile Press, large parts of which now had the Lord Chamberlain's Office well and truly in their sights. It was unfortunate too, that Penn's first sortie should come when the Lord Chamberlain himself was occupied on another front, accompanying the Queen and Prince Philip on their state visit to India and Pakistan.

Fings was a lively musical about some of the seedier elements of everyday life in London's East End, its characters including con artists, spivs, pimps, prostitutes (male and female) and corrupt policemen. The original script had been a straight play written by Frank Norman — 'an old lag' who brought 'an inside knowledge of his subject', having been 'in and out of the nick, during a goodly part of his twenty-eight years'. However, by the time it was licensed and first performed at the end of the fifties, Fings had become more or less a musical, the songs and final text having been created through the normal Theatre Workshop process of script development involving improvisation and adaptation. There had been some complaints from the Public Morality Council when the show had opened, but St James's Palace — keen to avoid confrontations and damaging publicity — had rejected claims that the show glorified criminals, maintaining that its message demonstrated that crime did not pay. This conveniently ignored the fact that while the two main gangsters do indeed decide to go straight ('Here's to life within the law/No more strife agin the law'), a police sergeant goes in precisely the opposite direction and takes over as 'guvner' of the criminal gang they are leaving. The implication that there was no firm dividing line between the law and the outlaw — that cops and robbers were seemingly interchangeable — was clearly a dangerous one in terms of morality and the social order. Still, the performances in the East End of London had received relatively little public attention. The difference in 1960 was that the show transferred to the West End's Garrick Theatre — where it would eventually run for some 800 performances. This level of exposure soon led to expressions of disapproval and alarm.

One of the first voices belonged to the Countess of Swinton, the wife of a long-serving Conservative MP and a personal friend of the Lord Chamberlain. Scarbrough's reply to her in March 1960 was described by Gwatkin as 'A first class letter which can serve as a pattern for future occasions'; actually, it is also striking for the liberal principles it enumerates, not least because it appears to be a private and personal expression of views: 'I would not like to see it published', he told her.Scarbrough's letter insists 'that the stage should try to be a mirror of life and particularly of contemporary life'; and given that 'some contemporary life is pretty sordid' it was 'not surprising that in these days there are a number of pretty sordid plays'. In other words, the theatre could not live in the past or hide from reality:

There has been quite a live development in the theatre of plays about, or attempting to typify working class themes, quite often by playwrights, or with the assistance of producers, from that class. The Theatre Workshop in Stratford, London E. is an example. Several of its plays have reached the West End theatres and this is one of them.

Perhaps surprisingly, he declared that 'In principle this development in the theatre should be welcomed' and 'certainly should not be suppressed', whatever one's personal preferences:

though I cannot say that I enjoy plays of this genre that I have seen, I feel that I must be especially careful to see that a play about life in a tenement or slum has the same freedom as, say, the more agreeable farces about life in country houses and smart hotels. Again that means that the idiom has to be accepted up to a point and the environment.

Perhaps, he suggested, this new emphasis would prove to be just a phase, and life would soon go back to how it had been in the fifties: 'I do not know whether this development in the theatre is going to last', wrote Scarbrough; 'I would think it doubtful whether the play going public will find entertainment in these sort of plays for any length of time'. But the Lord Chamberlain had no power to turn back society's clock. 'It should not be expected that the theatre should ignore the trends and manners of the day and be required to retain standards unrelated to those of the others', he advised the Countess:

We cut out quite a bit, but I admit we pass much which would never have been thought of for the stage fifty years ago ... One must take some notice of the freedom with which books, magazines, films, television, to say nothing of one's own children, discuss almost everything. It would not be fair on the theatre and certainly not politic for the censor to require quite different standards for the stage.

But others also took up the case against Fings. On 31 December 1960, the MP J.H. Temple passed to the Home Office a complaint from one of his constituents: 'I hope that your department will put as much pressure as possible on the Lord Chamberlain', he urged, since 'the nauseating stuff which appears on the stage and on television is one of the main causes of hooliganism and bad behaviour in our country today'. Temple confessed that he himself had never been to a performance other than My Fair Lady, but still felt able to tell his constituent that 'I more than agree with you that plays portraying the activities to which you refer are extremely bad for society and I cannot understand how they get sufficient support to justify their production'. The Home Office passed the buck: 'it is a matter entirely for the Lord Chamberlain and the Home Secretary has no authority to interfere with the exercise of his discretion'. Temple now wrote directly to Scarbrough, asking him 'to take note of the rising public indignation at some of the theatrical shows which are permitted to be shown on the London stage'. Penn replied carefully, echoing Scarbrough's affirmation that theatre must be allowed to 'reflect modern thought and aspirations, together with contemporary ideas on morality and politics'. The censor, said Penn, was obliged to 'exercise a very nice judgement indeed in deciding the point at which free expression becomes real incitement to crime or immorality'. He also suggested it was 'generally impossible to prove a direct connection between one of these advanced plays and a particular crime'. In part, the issue at stake was class. Whose world was depicted in the theatre, and in whose terms? The Censorship could not be seen to take sides:

It is probably true, too, that the impact of this type of play is the greater because recently it has portrayed the life of the 'submerged fraction' of the population and has often been written by authors drawn either from the working class or from the community depicted in the play. These plays being sordid in setting and character give a greater shock to the respectable than would similar themes were they expounded in the 'Society' or 'Country House' atmosphere which once ruled in theatre.

I know that Lord Scarbrough does not like the sordid type of play, but he has told me that he must be especially careful to see that a piece which deals with life in a tenement or slum has the same freedom as a more agreeable exposé of life set in a smart hotel.

This sense of fairness is important to note, as is the fact that the Office was prepared to resist pressures to be more draconian — though it does not necessarily indicate that St James's was relaxed about what was going on. Ronald Hill was asked to attend a performance of Fings incognito, ostensibly to check whether the actors were keeping to the licensed script, but also to get a sense of the atmosphere and audience reactions. 'I thought it badly acted', he reported; 'much of the dialogue I couldn't understand although I had read the ms., and I heard others saying that they couldn't hear'. Clearly, the accents and the language were not what West End audiences, or those who worked at the Palace, were used to. But Hill knew from experience how foolish the Censorship could be made to look if it tried to cut something which it had previously approved; after all, 'whores of even the lowest type have been depicted on the stage since The Beggar's Opera, and the two principal ladies here so burlesque the parts that there is nothing at all lascivious about them, nor, I should think, any inducements to weak-minded women to follow suit'. Nevertheless, he was uneasy about the apparent celebration of violence in the songs:

Carve up!
There's just been a
Carve up!
We've just seen a
Carve up!
In between a
Kickin' and a slashin'
And a nickin' and a bashin'
Wot a carve up!

The concern — as so often — was that behaviour seen on stage not only reflected but influenced society:

To my mind the most objectionable if not dangerous part of the whole piece was the 'Carve up' and the introduction of the Teddy Boys. The 'Carve up' from being a completely alien thing is, in stage plays, being written up almost into an inverted form of Knight-Errantry or Dragon Slaying and with the Teddy Boy accompaniment is being glamorised. In fact, the stage is helping knifing, razor slashing, and adolescent gangsterism to become accepted parts of life, which hitherto they have not been, and one has only to look towards America to see what this may lead to.

Hill acknowledged that 'Teddy Boys are glamorised even more in West Side Story', but he still felt that there was real danger here: 'I believe it is admitted that publicity and imitation have much to do with the frequency of such offences', he noted; and in the case of Fings, 'the sympathetic face it shows to the repulsive vices of the razor slasher and the ponce ... could, I feel, have real effect on the feebler minded youths who totter on the brink of this sort of thing'. Though, as someone else in the Office pointed out, such people 'don't go to this sort of play'.

Hill also identified — as was to be expected with a Joan Littlewood show which had been running for a year — 'that a certain amount of new matter has crept in'. Most of the changes were 'innocuous', but Hill listed some questionable additions:

When Rosie entered and sees Red Hot she puts her hand up his bottom in the gesture which denotes squeezing the testicles from behind ...

The punter appears with binoculars round his neck and says 'Come and look at my binoculars' to which one of the whores says 'Don't be filthy' ...

Tosher when examining the bag containing Red Hot's loot, over which Rosie is bending in a very tight skirt which shows her precise anatomy, put his hand on her bottom so that one finger lay along the line of cleavage. I know this will be denied but I know what I saw ...

Whilst dancing ... Posh pushed Rosie backwards against a table over which she half bent backwards, whilst with his legs open and hers between he pushed her in an unmistakeable way ...

The priest was, of course, introduced as a red-nosed reprobate ... When Lil is taking the licence out of her bosom the priest looks right down it and she comments upon his action.

Moreover, in the view of the Assistant Secretary, the Office had been too lenient in its original decisions:

I will stick out my neck and say that I really do not think that we should have passed the song 'The Student Ponce' even in this play. Living on the immoral earnings of a woman is in England regarded as the lowest form of activity a man can descend to, and it is always severely punished by the Courts. It is a legal offence. Here it is represented in such a way as, I should say, could be reasonably held to be a recommendation to immorality, and in my opinion it sounds worse when sung, with admiring Teddy Boys' accompaniment than it reads.

But it would have been impolitic to revisit earlier decisions.

Hill knew that the Office was entitled to require Theatre Workshop to cut any alterations it had made to the licensed script. However, given that developing and altering a performance in order to keep it 'live' was fundamental to Littlewood's method, such a demand was bound to create the sort of conflict which Scarbrough would have tried to avoid — especially given the bad publicity generated for the Censorship by previous head-on encounters with this company. With little experience, and probably knowing little or nothing of this history, Penn blundered in, sending an ill-judged letter to the licensee of the Garrick Theatre to warn him that an inspection had discovered 'that numerous unauthorised amendments in the allowed manuscript have been made'. These, said Penn, must all be deleted:

Act One indecent business of Rosie putting her hand up Red Bot's bottom ...

The interior decorator is not to be played as a homosexual and his remark 'Excuse me dear, red plush, that's camp that is', to be omitted, as is the remark 'I've strained meself'.

... the reference to the Duchess of Argyle is to be omitted.

Tosher ... is not to put his hand on Rose's bottom with finger aligned as he does at the moment.

The remark 'Don't drink that stuff it will rot your drawers' is to be omitted. Tosher is not to push Rosie back against the table when dancing in such a manner that her legs appear through his open legs in a manner indicative of copulation.

One of Penn's stipulations was so absurd that it was a gift to his opponents: 'The builder's labourer is not to carry the plank of wood in the erotic place and at the erotic angle that he does, and the Lord Chamberlain wishes to be informed of the manner in which the plank is in future to be carried.' As Scarbrough would have known, it was the kind of endorsement which, when leaked to journalists, could only make the Office look ridiculous, while providing excellent publicity for the theatre.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Censorship of British Drama 1900â"1968 by Steve Nicholson. Copyright © 2015 Steve Nicholson. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Timeline: The Political and Cultural Calender
Introduction: Galahad and Mordred
1. The Inflamed Appendix (1960-1961)
2. No Laughing Matter (1961-1962)
3. Pleasuring the Lord Chamberlain (1963)
4. Some S. I will not Eat (1964)
5. Blows for Freedom (1965)
6. Going Wild (1965-1966)
7. Getting Tough (1966)
8. An Affront to Constitutional Principles (1967)
9. Let the Sunshine In (1968)
10. Afterwords (1968-1971)
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Nicholson's skillful deployment of meticulous archival research is combined with an effective sense of the overall picture of theatre and performance in the 1960s and concludes with a persuasive caution against complacency about the situation after the end of pre-censorship." Russell Jackson, Theatre Notebook "... .we will lament the abolition of censorship insofar as it has robbed us of another volume." Anne Etienne, University College Cork, Studies in Theatre and Performance "It's a brilliant manuscript, forensic and fascinating, rich with detail and countless examples of the hilarious and bewildering attitudes of the later censorship, but with also Nicholson's characteristic fair-mindedness which treats the Lord Chamberlain and his comptrollers with respect for the difficult job they had to do and the nuanced way in which they did it. It's a great conclusion to a vital series." Dan Rebellato, Royal Holloway University of London

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