It’s been 40 years since the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil was banished from theatres, but that’s no excuse for critics to censor their own moral values.

Everyone has been banging on about 1968. But people tend to forget one of the most significant events of that year – the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship over British theatre. I’m not sure whether any celebration is planned or what form it should take. Maybe Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Bill Gaskill and other luminaries who suffered from the censor’s prescriptive power could gather outside his old office in St James’ Palace and utter a few choice expletives. Or maybe someone could sing a medley of numbers from Hair, the first show to benefit from theatre’s new-found freedom.

Because a whole generation has grown up that never experienced the Lord Chamberlain’s power, we need to remind ourselves of its anachronistic absurdity. Over the years, plays by Sophocles, Ibsen and Shaw were subject to bans. Both A View from the Bridge and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had to be staged in London, initially, under members-only “club” conditions to evade the censor. Living writers had to negotiate with the Lord Chamberlain’s office to get their scripts approved.

It was a crazy time, and we should all send up three cheers that dramatists can now go about their business subject only to the law of the land. In recent years, just about every taboo has been broken on stage. And, if we don’t always like the results, we should remind ourselves that so-called “in yer face” theatre is hardly a modern invention. Where, for instance, can you currently see a man dressing up his mistress’ skeleton in finery, smearing her skull with lipstick and inviting her murderer to kiss it? Not in a play by Sarah Kane but in Middleton’s Jacobean classic The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National Theatre.

I believe in the freedom of the artist to express his or her vision. But the critic and the paying customer have an equal right to register their dissent. Two plays exposed for me recently the difficulty of dealing with a particularly sensitive subject: the sexual exploitation of children. Anthony Weigh’s 2,000 Feet Away at the Bush got it absolutely right. Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court got it spectacularly wrong. I won’t dwell on the details but the latter was a dark thriller that deliberately invoked recent events in Austria as well as the Soham murders. I’m not saying that these subjects are off-limits – simply that the tone of Neilson’s piece, with its reliance on shock-effects and screams in the night, struck me as wildly inappropriate.

Contrast Weigh’s play which focused on the dilemma of a deputy sheriff, excellently played by Joseph Fiennes, forced to try and find shelter for a suspected paedophile outside the boundaries of a superstition-ridden Iowan town. I left Neilson’s play feeling as if I’d been illegitimately scared: I emerged from Weigh’s feeling I had genuinely learned something.

My point is that critics should not be afraid to speak out if they find something offensive, or deposit their own moral values in the cloakroom. Nor should they be cowed by unfortunate examples in the past, such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted, where everyone signally misjudged the author’s intentions. The alternative to a sharp tongue, as Eric Bentley once pointed out, is a mealy mouth. And I see no contradiction between assailing an author’s attitude and wholeheartedly rejoicing in the termination of censorship 40 years ago. Freedom is indivisible.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Michael Billington - Critical Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.