ENGLISH DRAMA AND THE CHALLENGE OF CENSORSHIP

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In 1893, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession was banned for attacking the morality of the smug Victorian age. Banned for about thirty years, the play only received its first public performance in 1925. As Vargas observes, “Shaw’s thorough investigation of the economics behind prostitution was too much in earnest for the censor and the great axe fell”.

After the World War II and when life was injected into the British theatre that has been in comatose throughout the war period, young British playwrights- led by John Osborne, as we have noted earlier, burst – the facade of silence by launching severe attack against the middle – class and its dramatic tradition to the shock of everyone. As Cornish and Ketels admit:

Plays that dominated the West End were substantially out of touch with the dislocations of the post – war world. They respected the taboos by the Lord Chamberlain against open discussion of sex, religion and the establishment, especially irreverent references to the royal family… The frank probing of character and social environment that was liberating drama on the European continent and in America was considered bad taste, if not morbid, by the English.

It is this drama that tucks away the happenings of the time that Osborne and his group rebelled against. Although the hero of Look Back in Anger, the play which started it all:

seems to have no positive solution to suggest for the long list of moral, social, and political betrayals he denounces. Although essentially negative in tone, the play caught the contemporary rebellious mood so well that Jimmy came to represent an entire generation of “angry young men” (Brockett and Hildy).

However, as the office of the Lord Chamberlain, which has been responsible for the censorship of drama in England, was beginning to trade tackles with theatre managers, the government that has been in dire need of recognition, relied on the public opinion and made a law stripping the Lord Chamberlain the power of dramatic censorship on 26th September, 1968. And as John Nathan says, this marked an end to official “reactionary philistinism” against the English drama. Brockett and Hildy (1999: 560) note that in the spirit of freedom:

A number of play previously forbidden were produced immediately, among them Hair (banned because of nudity and obscenity), Osborne’s A Portrait for Me (forbidden because of homosexual scenes), Hochhuth’s The Soldiers (banned because it was considered offensive to Churchill’s memory), and Edward Bond’s plays (forbidden because they were considered immoral).

It is important to state that the cancellation of the censorship law in 1968 gives playwrights the liberty to exploit their imagination and experience in their plays, but does that entail that they can go on and do whatever they like? John Nathan’s answer is “Not quite”. For him “The issue of censorship will be thick in the air”. He states that Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behud (Beyond Belief) caused “violent protests” in 2004 “at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, known as the Rep”. In his words:

One of the offending scenes involved a rape in Sikh temple. The protests were so violent that Bhatti had to go into hiding in fear of her life and the play was stopped.

Nathan recounts that the artistic director of the company, Jonathan Church says that “The police locked the actors in their dressing room for safety”. And that unconfirmed reports suggest that “protesters ran through the building with swords drawn”. Nathan equally reports that Richard Bean’s play “with racial stereotypes including agricultural Irish, oyvey-ing Hasidic Jews and militant Bangladeshi Muslims” attracted widespread protests in 2009.

The issue of censorship now moved from the authorities to the citizens. To avoid clashes with the people, Nathan opines that playwrights now indulge in self-censorship. He says that Richard Bean has been doing this following the experience of his controversial play; but on this issue, Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre and the director of England People Very Nice, appears to sit on the fence. Nathan cites him to have said:

I’d prefer not to have to choose between my responsibility to a good play and my responsibility to the people whose boss I am and over whom I have a duty of care.

Hytner’s position is borne out of the need to be cautious. Plays on religious and racial affairs are known according to Nathan to provoke “simmering tension” and frequently do “take their toll”. Yet, “their presence cannot be ignored in the theatrical landscape”, for that would amount to muzzling the freedom of expression.

CONCLUSION

This study indicates that the English drama has its own share of censorship. It reveals that the idea of censoring the drama arose out of the Puritans’ accusation of the theatre as a breeding ground for rogues, vagabonds, and prostitutes.

The article examines the origin of censorship in English drama, explores the reasons advanced for proscribing drama; discusses the stages of censorship; the impact of the official clamp down on the drama; the abolition of the censorship law, and the new trend of censorship in English drama.

 

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