THE LONDON STAGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23882, 9 August 1939, Page 18

THE LONDON STAGE

EFFECT OF CENSORSHIP A DEVITALISED THEATRE COMMENT ON 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. Plavs, 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 30 years ago. softer 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. To-day dramatists, actors, producers and the public seem to take the censorship as part of the order of Nature. In several months in London. having talked to people interested in the theatre and read much theatre criticism. I liave yet to hear anybody raise the question argued by Mr Shaw or see it raised in print. Asked for an explanation, a man of 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. Havinjr its influence There is no doubt that the censorship is keeping British drama innocuous. It is keeping writers for the stage a. mile awav from politics (except in such abstract form as whether woman's place is in the home), and even further from comment or satire on anybodywho is both important and alive. In revue, which is topical, this is painfujly 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 Airhee Semple McPheison—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 ort 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 BB.C, the ■manners of bridge players, the Fclies 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 week-ends, 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 effort 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 im*, portant. 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 contemSorary world as "A Midsummer Night's 'ream." 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 cud •of tea; They are in no danger (unless thev go to one maverick play of the lot); of being disturbed by talk of peace or war, or 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 dramatists do not write them. This is the state of the London theatre and the curious thing is that nobody seems to mind.

There is an even stranger fact. It is possible to evade the censorship. The Lord Chamberlain licences all theatres which admit " the public " and censors all entertainments they produce. Bui 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 Wood." .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 indeed. Strangest 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 run■ning 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 taboonot one was allowed in-any pantomime this season—Shaw puts these two worthies on the stage and keeps them there for nearly two hours. Trus. 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 -fit's, while Bombardcne'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 lacking 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 world, it should be a simple matter to form a club. Or why do they not write like Bernard Shaw? That, of course, is easier said than done. As a desperate remedy, why do they not protest against a censorship' which lets Shaw and th? Communists get away with crimes they cannot commit? Nobody does protest. It is very mysterious. Milton, as Wordsworth remarked, thou shouldst be living at this hour.