PUBLIC FIGURES

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 123, 20 November 1935, Page 21

PUBLIC FIGURES

AND THE ENGLISH STAGE

Do not be alarmed. I am not about to debate the ethics of'"The Soldier's Fortune" or "The Country Wife"; I only wish to comment on one of the most singular and regrettable features of our system of censorship, writes Sydney Carroll in the "Daily Telegraph," when discussing the censorship of drama. I refer to the regulation that has for political and State reasons established itself in the Lord Chamberlain's code that living statesmen, politicians, and public men shall not be pilloried or in any way represented, sympathetically or otherwise, upon our theatre stages. Is this rule really for the benefit of public life? If it is permissible (and it is) to travesty these gentlemen in prints, in books, and on cartoons, why should it be forbidden in our theatres or musichalls? That question shrieks for answer. The French in this matter, are much saner than we. Nothing is as healthful as public ridicule, unfettered and controlled only by public opinion. It may hurt, but so may the surgeon's healing knife. What general public benefit might not ensue from well-written satires and dramatic shafts brilliantly thrown at these would-be world dictators, these disturbers of the general or local peace, these petty tin trumpeters and tyrants who so afflict our' calm and quiet? Something dramatically drastic is needed to purge the world of its persecutors today. We are forbidden as theatre.managers all attempts to look at the world as it really is, to suggest through a play any solution to our overwhelming troubles, to aim at these provocative human targets of gigantic vanity, pride, and greed. This provision is. surely' a legacy of the times when it was necessary to preserve and maintain a respect for and loyalty to the Crown by : compulsion rather than through admiration and genuine feeling. It dates, back to the times when political scheming and privileged monopolies were more violent and rampant than they are today. KNOCK AND BOOST. Our times have improved to this extent. No public man resents being attacked. "The knock," to use an Americanism, is considered as good as "a boost," and the theatrical shelter erected by our laws against personalities has become merely an incitement to hypocrisy or subterfuge. It is an anachronism and should be abolished. We ought to be able to see in our theatres frank representations of great public figures at home and abroad, with statements of the various ideas they stand for. The argument that this would draw us into controversial unpleasantness and perhaps into warfare with our neighbours will not stand discussion. Our own rulers and statesmen are mercilessly depicted on foreign stages, our Princes are ridiculed or travestied, and our entire nation treated as fodder for the satirist. The contemporary stage has, as a consequence of this rule, no chance whatever of dealing with the real problems of the age. The theatre has necessarily to degenerate into a mere house for entertainment in which even Bernard Shaw has to assume the role of licensed jester in order to force home his insistent morality and benevolence. I am aware that thinly-disguised representations of our leading men have from time to time been permitted in our plays. But nothing ever approximating to the personal truth of their characters has ever been or is ever likely to be tolerated by the Lord Chamberlain's department. THE CAUSE OF MORALITY. This protest must not be taken as any indication of any dissatisfaction on my part with the way in which the present Lord Chamberlain and the present Reader of Plays discharge their difficult and trying responsibilities. They have not made the regulations. They liavc only to see that they are observed. And the tolerance and wisdom with which they do their office can only inspire wonder and satisfaction in any fair-minded victim of the sanctions they have to impose There is, as a public writer has just pertinently observed, a greater morality than that, of sex. And it is to the cause o£ this morality that public attention .in the theatres should.be directed. We petty men who walk under the legs o£ overgrown and unweildy Colossi to find ourselves dishonourable graves have no means of using our public theatres as weapons of defence or attack, and what we must ask ourselves is: Is this really in our interests and for the benefit of national or international peace?