THE LONDON STAGE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 11, 13 July 1939, Page 5

THE LONDON STAGE

EFFECT OF CENSORSHIP

A DEVITALISED THEATRE

STRANGE SITUATION

It is a little disturbing to find that the theatre censorship in England is never attacked, writes the London correspondent of the "Winnipeg Free Press." Plays, sketches, and vaudeville turns must be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain and approved by him before they can be performed in any licensed theatre in this country. This is well known. What is astonishing is that nobody seems to resent it. When Bernard Shaw about thirty years ago, after battles with the Lord Chamberlain, wrote a magnificent attack on stage censorship and printed it as a preface to "The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet," the issue must have been alive. Today dramatists, actors, producers, and the public seem to take the censorship as part cf the order of nature. In several months m London, having talked' to people interested in the theatre and read much theatre criticism, I have yet to hear anybody raise the question argued by Mr Shaw or see it raised in print. Asked for an explanation, a man ot liberal ideas and taste said: "You see, the censorship is no longer important. The Lord Chamberlain as a rule makes only trivial changes in scripts. Which, misses the point because people here who write for the theatre know what the Lord Chamberlain will pass and what he won't, and write accordingly. HAVING ITS INFLUENCE. •• There is no doubt that the censorship is keeping British drama innocuous It is keeping writers for the stage a mile away from politics (except in such abstract form as whether woman's place is in the home) and even further from comment or satire on anybody who is both important and alive. . In revue, which is topical, this is painfully obvious. New York revue is strongly political and personal. Hoover, Roosevelt, Gandhi (then a potent figure). John D. Rockefeller, Queen Mary and the late King George, Noel Coward, and Aimee Semple McPherson—all more or less expertly mimicked—could be seen at one time on a New York stage a few years ago. Without mentioning names "Of Thee I Sing" was a transparent spoof on the actual buffoons of Washington, D.C. Nothing like these robust and ribald works could pass the Lord Chamberlain so nothing like them gets written here for the commercial theatre. In "Nine Sharp," the brightest revue in London recently, the fun was poked at film stars, the London County Council's ceaseless road-mending, the 8.8.C., the manners of bridge players, the Folies Bergere, balletomania, and feelthy pictures. Its successor, the Gate Revue, has a polite tilt at musical snobs who do not really like Bach, the newspapers, Kensington debutantes, Londoners who visit village pubs and talk the natives out of their favourite chairs, spiritualism, hats, country weekends, and sulphurous brigadiers. "A CUP OF TEA." All pleasant enough if trite matters! for revue but not in it with such flaming topics—ready to hand—as Czechoslovakia, A.R.P., and the current ef-j fort of the Labour Party to extirpate its most intelligent members. The author of the Gate Revue manages to let the audience know how he feels. He begins with a song, sung by the whole company, asking the Lord Chamberlain please to let the show go on and promising to deal with nothing important. Here was a public announcement that his nibs the Lord Chamberlain compels the writers of revue to be duller than they might be. But none of the newspaper critics draw the moral that the Lord Chamberlain might be abolished with profit to the commonwealth. The Censor's heavy hand falls also on plays without music. Every play in London (with one shining exception to be noted) is as innocent of politics, and nearly as remote from the contemporary world as "A Midsummer Night's Dream." If people always go to the theatre to get away from it all and forget and never with any other hope, the London stage is—as people say, here —their cup of tea. They are in no danger (unless they go to one maverick play of the lot) of being disturbed by talk of peace or war, or J by any surgical operation on their social conscience—of being disturbed, that is, as Shakespeare must have disturbed the English in 1600 and O'Neill and Odets now disturb the Americans. THE UNWRITTEN PLAYS. It is not that plays like theirs would inevitably be banned by the Lord Chamberlain. It is simply that they might be. Consequently the British j dramatists do not write them. This j is the state of the London theatre and the curious thing is that nobody seems to mind. j There is an even stranger fact. It is possible to evade the censorship. The Lord Chamberlain licenses all theatres which admit "the public" and censors all entertainments they produce. But he has no authority over "clubs" which admit only members to their shows. It is possible by paying one shilling to become a member of the Unity Theatre and then to attend its pantomime, "Babes in the Woods," a burlesque in which the player impersonating Mr. Chamberlain draws the most venomous caricature I have ever seen on a stage and in which even the King^and Queen —as King Eustace the Useless and the -Queen with the mechanical smile —are parodied without restraint. The Unity Theatre is Communist and is drawing good houses to a show which would not have the faintest chance of passing the Lord Chamberlain. Very strange indeedStrangest of all is that there seems to be one dramatist, Bernard Shaw, who simply sails through the censorship like a galleon through an April shower. His play, "Geneva," is running in a licensed theatre. JOKE ABOUT DICTATORS. Though it is a rule in the Lord Chamberlain's office that even jokes about Hitler and Mussolini are taboo— not one was allowed in any pantomime this season—Shaw puts these two worthies on the stage and keeps them there for nearly two hours. True, they are called Ernest Battler and Signor Bombardone, but Ernest Battler wears a blonde wig and a Lohengrin outfit, rants against Jews and has crying fits, while Bombardone's toga and underslung jaw are enough without his rhetoric to make a portrait. The silliest Lord Chamberlain could not mistake them or fail to discover that Sir Orpheus Midlander, the Englishman. at the Geneva party, is our own Mr. Chamberlain. Mr. Shaw makes all three of them very earnest but very ridiculous, and he does so with the Lord Chamberlain's leave. So what do you make of it? I still think that if there seems to be something gutless about the English theatre, and there does seem to be, the blame is partly on the Censor. But if the new dramatists want to write about the actual W:Orl4» it should bea

simple matter to form a club. Or why don't they write like Bernard Shaw? That, of course, is easier said than done. As a desperate remedy, why don't they protest against a censorship which lets Shaw and the Communists get away with crimes they can't" commit? Nobody does protest. It is very mysterious. Milton, as Wordsworth remarked, thou shouldst be living at this hour.