Theatre Censorship in Britain: Silencing, Censure and by Helen Freshwater

By Helen Freshwater

This exploration of the wide range of censorship that has formed theatrical functionality in 20th and twenty-first century Britain examines the unpredictable results of censorship, deep-seated anxieties concerning the performative impression of the level, and the advanced questions raised by means of acts of theatrical censorship.

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Inspector saw the show and demanded to be allowed back stage at the next performance. ‘Nothing could make the dogs howl in this way,’ he declared, ‘except the most vicious cruelty’. I was there that night and I well remember his discomfiture. When the moment came he was shown [ . . 29 Casson’s anecdote suggests that the inspector’s dependence upon the evidence provided by his eyes – the appearance of the wolfhounds – meant that he failed to consider the possibility that the sound of howling came from another source.

Evadne’s frank, outspoken discussion of the benefits of sterilisation was obviously too much for the Lord Chamberlain’s examiners. 34 Stopes’s next attempt to gain theatrical publicity for her views on good breeding approached the issue from a different angle. Cleansing Circles, which was submitted for licensing in 1926, was addressed to the middle and upper classes. Written in response to Noel Coward’s The Vortex, it focuses on a wealthy but dysfunctional upper-class family. Sexually transmitted disease, sterility and drug addiction are paraded as part of a ‘modern vortex of degeneracy and beastliness’, before the family is finally reconciled in a melodramatic scene between Denis (the wayward father) and his son, Frank: FRANK: But don’t our lives mean the race.

21 We will revisit the ‘indescribable’ thrill of the Grand Guignol but first need to consider Levy’s negotiations with the Lord Chamberlain, which indicate the challenge inherent in any attempt to assess the London Grand Guignol’s appeal from a reading of its textual remnants. The Lord Chamberlain: insuperable, insensible, invulnerable? Levy complained that the Lord Chamberlain’s reaction to the London Grand Guignol was unwarranted in the Grand Guignol Annual Review. ’22 Yet closer inspection of his dealings with the Lord Chamberlain reveals that the British censorship system was not as omniscient as this denunciation might suggest.

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