CENSORSHIP: THEN AND NOW

Once it was directed at left-wing and liberal ideas. Today it

holding firm against it, but he's not sure the BBC will SIR Peter Hall is making a six-part televi- sion series of Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning novel about the African slave trade. It is an expensive project. At first, Sir Peter thought it would need American money as well as British, especially since it would also be shown on American television. An American television company agreed to part-finance it. But the company executive concerned made one condition — none of the slave traders was to be black.

The book says otherwise. It was black slave barons who sold other blacks to the white merchants. Here is the book's description of a West Coast slave baron: 'He was a tall obese man, the colour of dry clay. In addition to his gold-laced tricorn hat, he wore a pair of linen drawers, a cutlass and a necklace of feath- ers. He was flanked by several men armed with muskets.' Yel- low Henry, the slave baron, stands at the prow of his boat carrying 'five men, two boys, two women and a girl, all com- pletely naked. They sat in silence, their arms bound behind them and their heads forced upright by means of a common yoke.' Ten prime slave,' Yellow Henry shouts to the captain of the British ship, whereupon Yellow Henry's personal orchestra, consisting of a drummer and a bugler, strike up. Yellow Henry smells strongly of rum.

Sir Peter refused to distort history. The setting for Sacred Hunger is the slave trade as organised by whites and blacks in the 18th century. He told the American television executive that the black slave trader must remain black. The executive said, no dollars then. Sir Peter went back to Channel 4, the co-financiers of the project. He told them he could not agree to the American terms. Channel 4 said they would stand behind him. In fact, Channel 4's attitude was — don't have anything more to do with them. They then informed Sir Peter that they would fund the whole £7 million project themselves. The idea of American backing was dropped. But when I spoke to Sir Peter, he felt very strongly about this brand of 'political cor- rectness' invading the arts.

'This is a problem,' said Sir Peter, on the eve of his departure to South Africa to choose location spots for Sacred Hunger. 'The Americans are terrified that if we show a black slave trader, they'll lose money at the box office, that they will be thought "incorrect" by a sizeable part of the dollar-paying public. They don't want to offend the black community by showing that slaves were collected and provided by the blacks, and that there were black slave barons. They are frightened of black opin- ion. It's wonderful that there is a black opinion now that people can be frightened of. But I think this should encourage one to tell the truth and not the opposite.'

Sir Peter has had plenty of problems with mistaken 'correctness' before Sacred Hunger: 'When I did The Merchant of Venice with Dustin Hoffman, there was considerable anxiety among his agents and managers initially as to whether he should be doing a play that they regarded as anti- Semitic. I said it's not a play that's anti- Semitic, it's about anti-Semitism. The extraordinary thing about The Merchant of Venice is that in a racist society and a very anti-Jewish society Shakespeare actually managed to write a play saying, "Do not be racist." The Christians behave much worse than Shylock and goad him into being what he is. But there are schools and English courses in America that will not teach The Merchant of Venice.'

The difficulties introduced by correctness are also impeding the authority of the director. While directing the new produc- tion of A Streetcar Named Desire, which has just opened in London, Sir Peter says he found 'one of the small-part actors refused to say the word "nigger". Finally, I per- suaded the actor to say it by stating that that was how Tennessee Williams wrote it.' And he foresees difficulties in the cast- ing of Sacred Hunger: 'One of the problems of Sacred Hunger is going to be persuading black actors to play slaves.'

What Sir Peter refers to as 'puritanical Stalinism' is now infiltrating everywhere. About his recent Broadway produc- tion of An Ideal Husband, he says, 'There was great anxiety among American managers that certain areas of the play might offend women because Lady Chiltern shows herself to be so subservient to the man. Yes, Wilde was a man of his time, but he was terribly pro-woman and pro-feminist. So I ignored the anxieties and they passed.'

For Sir Peter, today's left-wing and liber- al censorship has replaced the right-wing censorship which he was confronted with earlier in his career. He recalled directing the first British production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1957 when homosexuality was still against the law: 'It was banned by the Lord Chamberlain because it dared to sug- gest that homosexuality might exist. It didn't say it did, it said it might. So the play had to be put on in a club theatre and you had to join the club and sign on for immorality before you were allowed to see it. This is only another form of political correctness. I think political correctness is censorship under another name. It's mak- ing sure that subjects which are contentious and need discussing are not dealt with.'

'Are we the best judges of censorship at the time we censor?' he asked. 'Ibsen was censored. Shaw and Granville Barker were censored. Tennessee Williams was cen- sored. It's a pretty extraordinary list of geniuses who, if they had been allowed to speak, would have illuminated their age. Are we so alarmed and craven that we can't allow freedom? It would have done the 1890s good to have seen Shaw's Widow- ers' Houses or Ibsen's Ghosts. It would have done the 1900s good to have seen Granville Barker's Waste, which I suspect was banned not because of its sexual dealings, but because it took the lid off politics. Waste wasn't performed until 1936.

'I don't think governments or managers or producers or politicians should tell you what you should say or shouldn't say. Artists must be allowed to say what they have to say, otherwise we won't remain healthy. To hand it over to a "nanny state" is going to result in Stalinism.'

There is also the issue of political correct- ness where it is intended to protect children. Sir Peter considers it needs rethinking: 'To be scared and to be horrified is a necessary part of growing up, and fairy stories and hor- ror stories prove this. It's a part of education. What we need — and in particular from the BBC — is more information so that parental control can be exercised. These categories saying there's a bit of sex or a bit of violence are too vague. We need categories that tell you the nature of the violence or the nature of the sex. Generally I've let my children watch anything, but I've wished to know what it is they're watching and to discuss it with them afterwards.'

He is fascinated by the political correctness that he believes Walt Disney films have always maintained: 'Thirty years ago I took two of my small children to see Disney's Swiss Family Robinson. The family are on top of the mountain and they push great big logs down the hill onto the pirates who are ascending the mountain to capture them. In the cinema there were about 700 children all cheering their heads off with, franldy, blood-lust. But because of the Dis- ney code of correctness you never saw a maimed, squashed, bloodied or suffering pirate. People will say, "Quite right, you mustn't expose children to violence." Well then, you shouldn't let them enjoy violence.'

Sir Peter is full of praise for what he believes to be Channel 4's intelligence and courage in not censoring Sacred Hunger. But he's not so sure that the same freedom would have happened with the BBC: 'The BBC is more nervous. They have to respond to the government of the day. The BBC is governmentally controlled. The BBC would undoubtedly ask me to do it as a co-production with America, which would mean American actors and probably no black slave barons.'

I asked Sir Peter if the situation Would improve with a Labour government and he replied, 'I think it's almost endemic with politicians that, whatever party is in power, they want to prevent disturbance. Both par- ties distrust the arts. They distrust free expression, they distrust creativity, and they certainly distrust broadcasting. The history of broadcasting in this century consists of politicians all the time trying to clip the wings of the informers. And they do this because information makes their jobs more difficult.'

Sir Peter sees the politicians as being as culpable for the present state of affairs as those Hollywood so-called 'creative direc- tors'. It is with satisfaction that he states, 'One of the wonderful aspects of the late part of this century is that we now realise that politicians are as amateur, inexpert, weak and corrupt as all the rest of us. don't think, for instance, that President Kennedy's life as a Casanova would be allowed concealment today. And it's fairly odd to think now that it was known about then but not printed.'

It is important to Sir Peter that the artist is listened to: 'Proposing censorship of the arts is the equivalent to saying we should censor news. Constraint on information and constraint on creativity are one and the same thing and equally dangerous. I don't think there is any point to art unless it is allowed to open people's minds to the way they live, particularly in an utterly pagan society. And political correctness is just another way of filtering the truth.'