1Until it was abolished by Harold Wilson’s reforming Labour government in 1968, British Theatre laboured under a unique system of censorship dating back to 1737, which required that a copy of all new plays be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain–the head servant in the royal household–for approval and licensing in advance of any performance. Without his signature, the play could not be staged in public, and no deviations or additions could be made to the authorised script.1

The Lord Chamberlain: the custodian of good taste on British stage

2Very few plays were read in their entirety by the Lord Chamberlain, whose other duties included organising garden parties at Buckingham Palace, dealing with public dignitaries, accompanying the monarch on State visits, and supervising the annual tupping of the royal swans. His office was in St James’s Palace and much of the administrative work was undertaken by a Comptroller, an Assistant Comptroller, Secretaries and official Readers, whose task was to write a summary of each play, drawing attention to any aspects which might require more careful consideration, and making a decision as to whether–and with what provisos–they could recommend it for licence. The Lord Chamberlain, however, took responsibility for final decisions, as well as setting general policies and rules. Unofficially, he also sought advice from government ministers, clerics, foreign embassies, the monarch, and anyone whose views he deemed appropriate.

3One of the most significant aspects of his powers in relation to theatre was that there were effectively no limits to his authority. He was answerable to no-one–not even to parliament–and was not obliged to justify decisions to playwrights or theatre managers. Although his rulings were made on the basis of a written text rather than its performance, it was not only the spoken word which came under his jurisdiction. Costumes, stage directions, gestures, sound and lighting effects and stage set were all open to censorship, and there were instances when actors and managers were prosecuted and convicted because of the inclusion of stage business which had not been specified in the approved script. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) insisted that “A copy of the play means a statement of the entire action of a play, as opposed to ‘the book of the play’ which would be the phrase for use where the dialogue only was concerned.”2

4The Lord Chamberlain did not function in isolation, and nor did he always occupy extreme positions. Terence Gray, an innovative theatre director in Cambridge during the 1920s and 1930s who grew up in Ireland and clashed frequently with the LCO, observed that Britain was the only country in which the theatre censor could be a national hero. Having grown up in Ireland, Gray thought of himself as an outsider in England where “Submission to anything and everything reigns supreme,” and where “There is no law or regulation so fatuous or so ludicrous, so flagrantly stupid, unjust, idiotic, degrading or contemptible that every Englishman will not bow down to it and obey it without a murmur.”3 This is probably an over-statement, but it is true that St James’s Palace received many complaints–both from organised groups such as the Public Morality Council and from members of the public–that he was too lenient in what he allowed. Lords Chamberlain usually described themselves as licensors rather than as censors, and claimed to be ahead of rather than behind majority public opinion. There is no reliable way to measure this, but the claim is not implausible. Certainly, at least up until the late 1950s there existed a pervasive a climate and culture of censorship in Theatre which extended well beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s authority. For example, the Lord Chamberlain’s writ applied only to texts from after 1737, but it seems that Shakespeare–and especially Restoration comedies–were almost always presented in bowdlerised versions.

5Without denying the impact of censorship, it is also important to acknowledge that relatively few plays–a mere handful each year–were turned down outright, and the Censors frequently railed against newspaper reports that a play had been banned; so far as the LCO was concerned, they usually just hadn’t been licensed yet because the manager and the writer had refused to make the necessary alterations. The Censors could never really understand why any reasonable playwright or manager could object to the control they exerted; those who did so were obviously motivated by dubious and dishonest motives. As one of the LCO staff noted when attempts were being made in 1949 to introduce an anti-censorship bill to parliament, “The author of an ordinary decent play has nothing to fear from the censorship whilst the author who wishes (probably under some guise) to exploit an unsavoury incident or fact, will always be against any censorship as tending to cripple his genius (or dirt).”4 In other words, it was simply the inflated view certain playwrights had of their own importance that prevented them from conceding to the Lord Chamberlain’s demands. Samuel Beckett, for example, was “a conceited ass” for refusing to accept the “small alterations which could be made with no detriment” to Endgame.5 When John Osborne accused the LCO of prejudice and of being “wilfully obstructive,” he was easily dismissed as a “silly little man” and likened to “the producer of a third rate nude revue”; on another occasion, one of his plays was summed up as “naughty little smart-alec small boy John Osborne scribbling words on lavatory walls.”6 Edward Bond–whose Early Morning was one of the last plays to be banned in its entirety–was accused of suffering from “a very sick mind” and “a diseased imagination.”7 Christopher Hampton was the “unspeakable little author” of a “nauseating play.”8 Fernando Arrabal was the author of “obfuscated bilge,” and therefore “beneath contempt.”9 While Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was “pretentious, over-strained, over-emphasised and hysterical”–a play in which the author “vomits up the recurring theme of his not-too-subconscious.”10 However, while playwrights generally opposed censorship, the majority of theatre managers always supported it, believing that the Lord Chamberlain’s licence–with its royal imprimatur–was an effective protection against prosecution or moral campaigners, absolved them from responsibility and placing it with the monarch. This was especially useful for the managers of touring shows who feared that the removal of the licensing system would lead to inconsistent in standards and policies across different towns and cities.

6One alleviating factor which allowed frustrated playwrights and directors some room for manoeuvre was that a convention had been established by which performances taking place in private clubs were effectively ignored. Technically, no such exemption was indicated within the law, and by the 1960s the Lord Chamberlain had been privately informed by the government’s own Law Officers that there were no grounds for excluding so-called “private” or “club” performances from his jurisdiction. However, at least through the first half of the 20^th Century, theatre clubs had functioned as a “safety valve” which released the steam of repression and helped blunt opposition to the system as a whole. The argument was that because theatre clubs played only a handful of performances to relatively small audiences, and provided they did not seek to take advantage of their “freedom,” it was normally safe to turn a blind eye to them. But the practice was eventually undermined by managers seeking to circumvent the Lord Chamberlain’s sometimes bizarre decisions. In the 1950s, when he refused to license plays by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams which had already played on Broadway, a small theatre club went into partnership with a large theatre in London’s West End and presented them to large houses for extended runs. Clearly, such performances were “private” only technically and in name. Similarly, in the 1960s both the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company threatened to turn themselves into private clubs for specific productions, purely in order to evade the Lord Chamberlain’s rulings. As a result, it was evident that the club system was unsustainable, since it was really mocking the Lord Chamberlain and effectively circumventing his decisions with impunity; worse, it potentially risked exposing to ridicule those parts of the British establishment which stood directly behind the Lord Chamberlain–namely, the royal household.

7Although the law on theatre censorship survived until 1968, as early as 1909 a Government Enquiry had formally recommended that a licence from the Lord Chamberlain should become optional. Had this been adopted, managers would have been able submit scripts if they wanted the insurance a licence was thought to offer, or proceed without one and take their chances. The committee also attempted to limit and specify the criteria on which a licence might be refused. None of the recommendations were adopted, because no legislation was introduced to parliament, but the criteria were used as a touchstone over the next sixty years, and pointed to by the Lord Chamberlain even during the 1968 enquiry. It is therefore worth noting the grounds for refusal proposed:

“It should be his duty to license any play submitted to him unless he considers that
it may reasonably be held–
To be indecent;
To contain offensive personalities;
To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or any person recently dead;
To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence;
To be calculated to conduce to crime or vice;
To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any foreign Power; or
To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace.”11

8Inevitably, the definitions and their implications are wide open to interpretation and argument. The use of the term “To be calculated to” in some–but not all–clauses is particularly interesting in that it might seem to place the emphasis on the intention of the writer and manager, rather than on the likely effect. Though not in the case of religious topics.

9While the distinctions and boundaries are not absolute, the majority of cuts imposed by LCO probably related to sexual morality, unacceptable language and violence. Yet speaking during the 1968 parliamentary debate, the radical Labour MP (and future leader of the Party) Michael Foot reminded the House that the origins of the system lay elsewhere:

“People have forgotten that politics have been the main cause of censorship… It was political fears which persuaded the original introduction of the censorship and it has very largely been political fears which have sustained it ever since.”12

10Certainly, it was this political dimension which particularly concerned many MPs during the debate, and it is on political censorship that the remainder of this article will concentrate, focusing in particular on two examples, one from the 1930s and the other from the 1960s.

Censorship for political and diplomatic reasons

11It was crucial to the legitimacy of the Lord Chamberlain that he–like the monarch he served–could claim to somehow be standing above politics. “As a class, Lord Chamberlains have all certain qualities,” wrote one of his staffin 1961; “As Members of the Royal Household they are demonstrably politically neutral.”13 It therefore followed that the same should be true of theatre: “The stage is not a political arena, and it is not considered desirable that important political questions, involving, perhaps, diplomatic relations with foreign Powers should be dealt with there.”14 Rather than a potentially repressive instrument of control ensuring the preservation of the status quo, and invented for directly political reasons, theatre censorship was completely normalised; it was “so old as to be almost an organic growth.”15 And although the system conferred “autocratic powers” on the Lord Chamberlain, this need not cause anxiety, since “as so often happens with our English system of balances, Press and other vociferous sources of protest are so strong as to constitute a very powerful safeguard against any tyrannical use of the powers granted.” Let us see how this worked in practice.

12While we know there were individuals in senior positions within the British political establishment who had sympathies for Hitler through the 1930s, there was no shortage of books, newspapers, speakers and artists attacking the Nazis. Uniquely, the theatre was not permitted to do so. The official reason for the ban imposed by the Lord Chamberlain on portraying them was that the system of licensing meant that authorities in other countries would assume that any views expressed within a play were not just those of the playwright, but also enjoyed the approval of the British monarch. “I have no wish to deter people from showing up the brutality of the Nazi regime, but this can perfectly well be done in books and novels, and even published plays, but not by plays acted on the English stage,” wrote the Lord Chamberlain in 1934. It was not at all a matter of accuracy or truth: “The brutality of the Nazi regime is, I imagine, beyond question” he acknowledged, freely; “but much as my personal sympathies are with those who wish to enlighten the world as to doings in Germany, it would be very mistaken policy to allow such plays to be acted on the English stage.”16 If Britain was to remain officially neutral and disengaged, then it was imperative that the Theatre should mirror this:

“Whatever one may think of the Hitler regime, the persecution of Jews etc. they are no direct concern of ours, so that the presentation of this picture of conditions on the British stage could not be regarded otherwise than unfriendly and lead to official complaint which would be difficult to answer. Besides which if we allow this in England, our authorities can hardly complain of retaliation by anti-British plays in Germany.”17

13The near absence from the British stage of plays about what events in Germany did not reflect a lack of concern from playwrights and managers: As early as 1934, the Lord Chamberlain warned the Foreign Office that “It is not easy to go on shielding the Germans from their misdeeds being depicted on the stage in this country.”18 Even within St James’s Palace there was not complete unanimity over the issue. In 1938 the official Reader recommended that W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier could be licensed, given that the play approached its subject indirectly:

“Great care has been taken to create an impersonal Leader, but it is impossible to draw such a character without his resembling one of the two known living examples because they are to some extent mere advocates of a philosophy, a philosophy which it is the right, and duty, of modern English poets to attack.”

14He added that “To forbid this would be to subscribe to fascist ideology.” But his recommendation was over-ruled by the Lord Chamberlain:

“At such a time as this the best interests of the country are served by avoiding any unnecessary exasperation to the leaders of the German people–even if this entails a certain muzzling of contemporary playwrights… I agree that the totalitarian principle is one which is abhorrent to the normal Englishman but I disagree that it is the duty of modern Poets to attack this principle.”19

15In fact, it would not be accurate to suggest that no plays about Hitler and the Nazis were staged during the 1930s. Settings and narratives could be “ruritanianised”–on occasions, the Lord Chamberlain even suggested this to their authors–and audiences were able to recognise metaphors and see through disguises. Yet it is also true that until September 1939 the Lord Chamberlain regularly sent scripts to the German Embassy for advice, which he almost always took. And what was arguably one of the strongest and most unusual attacks on the Nazis–an early farce co-written by Terence Rattigan–was repeatedly turned down and remained unstaged until its relevance had passed.20

16Three decades later, the wish to protect the USA government from criticism on the British stage was almost as strong, above all in relation to the war in Vietnam. One production which had a particular impact and significant repercussions was a piece devised by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook with the deliberatly ambiguous title of US. The text famously ends with a powerful speech calling for bombs to be dropped on London so that we can experience and understand what is happening in Vietnam, and the apparent burning of a butterfly with a match. When US was submitted in September 1968, the Reader described it as “a piece of hysterically subjective anti-Vietnam War propaganda,” which was “dangerous and insulting to an ally.” The Lord Chamberlain agreed it was “revolting and tiresome stuff” and “highly inflammable,” and he sought advice from the Foreign Office. Possibilities were raised of withdrawing funding from the RSC and sacking the company’s artistic director, Peter Hall. Ultimately, and after much debate and argument, the script was passed with only minimal alterations, largely following the advice of a former Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, now a member of the House of Lords:

“If the Foreign Office give it as their opinion that the production of this play at the Aldwych would ‘impair our relations with a friendly power’ or whatever the phrase is then doubtless the Lord Chamberlain will have to give much weight to this opinion. But I think perhaps the FO will do well to remember one or two points before rendering such advice.
I imagine that most of the anti-American, anti war stuff contained in this play has already been published in pamphlets…
[…] the ideas in this play are not exactly new or earth shaking.
I imagine the Royal Shakespeare audiences at the Aldwych are usually the same, very left wing beardies. So the play would be preaching to the converted and I doubt if many new recruits would be won for the anti-Americans.
To ban a play always gets more publicity than the play itself. And I think this could probably be explained to that nice and very sensible American ambassador.”21

17Nevertheless, the Lord Chamberlain insisted on a guarantee from the RSC Chairman that the performance was “not calculated to give offence to responsible American opinion.” This ensured that in the event of complaints from the American government he would be able to deflect the blame away from himself (and the monarch) and onto the RSC. He even tried–unsuccessfully–to persuade the Chairman to replace “not calculated to” with “not liable to,” which would have left the Company even more exposed.

18Although changes to the script had actually been minimal, the arguments over US, and the principles behind them, resurfaced in evidence presented at the Government Enquiry which led directly to the 1968 Theatres Act and the abolition of pre-censorship. The RSC informed the Committee that their first contact with the LCO over this play had been a phone call to the Chair of the Company from the Lord Chamberlain, stating “that he wished to disallow the show in its entirety because, in his own words, it was ‘beastly, anti-American, and left-wing’,” and advising “that the Governors might not wish to support such a production.” In their evidence to the enquiry, the RSC insisted that they felt more strongly about political censorship than anything else, and that “not being able to deal with contemporary subjects in any open way” was “terribly dangerous.”22 The majority of the committee agreed, and the fact that the original text had, in the end, survived almost unscathed did not appease them. For crucially, they acknowledged that in the interventions and actions he had taken, the Lord Chamberlain had not in any way gone beyond his brief, and that he would have been perfectly within his rights to ban the play. The problem therefore lay not with how the Lord Chamberlain had behaved, but with the authority that was vested in him:

“The Committee are not suggesting that in the case of US and similar plays the Lord Chamberlain exceeded the powers granted him by parliament. But they consider that the existence of these powers is inappropriate to a modern democratic society.”

19Even more worrying was the fact the Lord Chamberlain had confirmed to the committee “that he does at times exercise a political censorship,” and that there were “one or two [plays] with political contents” which were currently “having difficulties.” The recognition that overtly political censorship could no longer be accepted in a democratic state was one of the strongest factors in the Committee’s decision to recommend abolition, and in parliament’s decision to enact that recommendation.

20In Britain, no-one was killed or imprisoned for the plays they wrote. Nor were playwrights even fined–though performers and managers occasionally were. Probably some playwrights were silenced, and others muted, and doubtless there were writers who, because of censorship in the theatre, turned elsewhere. Overall, then, it is hard to assess how much theatre censorship in Britain really mattered. The playwright Arnold Wesker claims that, at least by the late 1950s, it did not matter very much: “The Lord Chamberlain didn’t inhibit substance… [He] was merely an irritant who forbade swear words and blasphemous expletives.”23 But Edward Bond, John Osborne, and the directors of both the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company were among many who saw things very differently. Moreover, George Strauss, the Labour MP who chaired the 1967 enquiry and helped steer the subsequent legislation through parliament, told the House of Commons that “Every author of original ideas who has examined in his plays topical, social or political problems which the censor considered respectable people might find unpalatable, has at one time or another come under his ban.”24 He might have been echoing earlier voices, such as that of the innovative director Terence Gray who complained in the 1930s that “WE ARE EFFECTIVELY PROHIBITED FROM PRESENTING THE MASTERPIECES OF TODAY,” and insisted that “The best modern drama of Europe is almost closed to the English theatre.” Gray also issued a warning to those who would come later not to forget the reality of the “petty tyranny” and “absurd abuse” which he, and others, were forced to suffer: “To future ages it will appear as darkened and ridiculous as the Inquisition, but for us, alive, working, giving our time on earth and our worldly goods in the cause of dramatic art it is a jest only in the abstract.”25

21In 1967, the Arts Council of Great Britain gave evidence to the Government Enquiry:

“The dramatist alone (and in Britain alone) is singled out for disabilities that nobody else is expected to tolerate. Behind closed doors, his work can be mutilated, his property effectively destroyed, his livelihood jeopardised at the whim of another private citizen answerable to no-one and administering no law–nor even an ascertainable body of private rules–and bound by nothing but his own variable judgment and prejudices…
And it should be considered equally serious that a completely untrammelled censor dictates not only what the playwright shall be allowed to say but also, therefore, what the rest of us shall be allowed to hear. Outside the Fascist and Communist countries, there is nowhere in the world where one man’s taste or doctrine can be enforced upon the rest of the community.”26

22Their evidence also described the Lord Chamberlain as having had “a contraceptive effect” on the development of British drama. In 1966, the Lord Chamberlain’s Secretary had sought to warn that “What might come before the public but for his Office we can only guess.”27 With his protection removed, it was possible that a new theatre could be born.