12 SEPTEMBER 1925, Page 13

THE CENSORSHIP OF THE DRAMA

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I know not by what fantastic slip of the pencil I conveyed that I was in favour of retaining the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain. I do not wonder at the incredulity with which you reported this apparent aberration. I will make my position clear as briefly as I can.

When the retinue of Henry VIII. accreted a more or less well behaved bobtail of jugglers, acrobats, minstrels, players and so forth, it was necessary to place them under the authority of an official of the King's household, without any constitutional checks whatever. He probably exercised it in extreme instances with a dogwhip. The present absolutely despotic control of the drama , by the Lord Chamberlain, though statutory, represents the dogwhip of Henry's Master of the Revels. It has obviously no relation to existing circumstances.

The Lord Chamberlain may be a most admirable master of the King's household without the smallest acquaintance with the theatre or its literature. I can remember a Lord Chamber- lain who began by asking " Who is Tolstoy ? " His aristo- cratic contempt for professional persons in general, and for such riffraff as theatrical folk and journalists in particular, was so superb that when at last he realized that his department had been complained of for licensing a loose play, he retorted by making the author of that play his official Reader of Plays, quite in the spirit of Anatole France's aristocrat who concluded .his written reply to a democratic remonstrance by the formula " Receive my toe in your five thousand behinds."

He was probably an ideal Lord Chamberlain.

One of his predecessors accepted a handsome present of plate from the London managers. If he had been a Prime Minister or a Lord Chief Justice, England would have rung with the scandal. As it was, nobody minded.

There is no reason to doubt that he, too, was everything that a Lord Chamberlain ought to be. We have only to contrast the appeal of etiquette and of the details of royal house-keeping and court dress with the appeal of art and literature as elements of national culture to see that the presumption must always be that the better the Chamberlain the worse the Censor.

Besides, if we are to have an historical drama, it is obviously advisable that the King should not be implicated in its judg- ments, as he must be as long as his chief domestic officer has the power to bind or loose the dramatist. A performance of The Mikado is at present a lampoon on a foreign ruler to which the King is accessory. An attempt was actually made to suppress it on this account after it dawned on us that Japan was a civilized and formidable Power which we should have to take seriously in future. At one time I thought of writing a play about Mahomet ; but as I foresaw that it could not be performed without compromising the King with our then dear political friend Turkey, I gave it up.

In short, the one person on earth who should have nothing to do with a largely satirical and discourteous art which raises fierce controversy on subjects on which the Court is consti- tutionally obliged to be neutral, is the Lord Chamberlain.

Unfortunately the precedents set by him have made all your correspondents incapable of conceiving any form of theatre control except that exercised at St. James's Palace. For example, the startling success of the control of the variety theatres by the London County Council, which transformed the wretched old vulgar music-halls into our Coliseums and Empires, suggests control by the local authorities. Immedi- ately there is a cry of " Imagine the London County Council reading plays and taking a vote whether they should be licensed or not ! " as if any sane person had ever contemplated such a physical impossibilty. What is possible is that theatres should be licensed annually by the local authority as hotels are ; so that if a theatre be grossly miseonducted the renewal of the licence can be opposed on the motion of any of the

representatives, and prevented if he or she can convince the majority, a condition which no bigot or crank could fulfil. The authority could also be approached by deputation, as in the once famous case of the late Mrs. Ormiston Chant and the Empire promenade.

In the case of a hotel, the reason for cancelling the licence must be what is called a judicial reason : that is, a licensing justice must not refuse a licence because he is a convinced teetotaller. A local councillor objecting to the renewal of a theatre licence because in his opinion the theatre is the gate of hell should be out of order. Further, the character of any of the plays performed should not be brought into question unless the manager had been prosecuted and convicted for performing it.

The always possible prosecution of a manager for obscene, blasphemous, or seditious libel should be reserved for the Public Prosecutor. The irresponsible common informer, representing no one but himself, or possibly some society of prudish bigots, should be abolished. It is within the com- petence of a local authority at present to call the attention of the Public Prosecutor to a questionable play or to anything else which seems to call for his intervention ; but he is not bound to take any action thereon if, from his central view of public policy, he does not think action advisable.

Under such conditions the performance of a play could not be prevented. But any manager tempted to misconduct his theatre, either on the stage or, what is far more important, in the front of the house, would have consequences to face sufficient to keep him in much better order than at present. The stage does not matter so much, because it is always power- fully censored by the audience when the audience is a genuine play-loving audience. The dangerous person is not the supposedly licentious playwright, but the manager who uses free admissions to a theatre as a bait for his bars and his promenaders.

Managers, actors, and theatre financiers as a body will never consent to any reform : it must be carried over their heads. To them the Lord Chamberlain is an unmixed blessing. With- out him they would be in the hands of the author ; for it is not their business to judge whether a play should or should not be performed from the point of view of public morals or politics or religion. Many of them are honestly and utterly incapable of understanding the sort of play that puzzles the Censor. If Mr. Redford, a professional censor, could misunder- stand The Shewing,-up of Blanco Posnet as ludicrously as he did, how is an unfortunate " backer," or manager, or even actor-manager, whose abilities and accomplishments imply no critical powers, to know whether The Cenci, or Die Walkiire, or The Power of Darkness, or Mrs. Warren's Profession, is permissible or not ? At present he takes them to the Lord Chamberlain ; and if the Lord Chamberlain says No, the drama may be strangled, but the manager knows where he is, and simply brings along On with the Dance (an excellent revue, by the way, but not a vital contribution to the development of our theatre), to which the Lord Chamberlain says " Yes : two guineas, please." For that two guineas the manager gets a royal defence against any possible attack by the police, the common informer, the Public Prosecutor, the local authority, or anyone else. What manager would grudge the money, or not die in the last ditch in defence of his noble guarantor ?

I see I have not been brief ; but I hope my views are now [After reading Mr. Bernard Shaw's entertaining letter, we believe more strongly than ever in the optional censorship recommended by the Joint Committee of 1906. If such a censorship were introduced the managers and actors would still have the protection which they would rather die than give up. The serious playwrights like Mr. Shaw, when burning to introduce a hazardous subject to the public, would not take the risk of being refused a licence. They would produce the play without one. If Mr. Shaw wrote his Mahornet, produced it under these conditions, and was prosecuted, we would be willing to pay all the costs of his defence.—En. Spectator.]