The Spectator’s Notes | 18 December 2004

People won’t put it in Books of the Year, but there is no more entertaining Christmas present than The Lord Chamberlain Regrets by Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson (British Library). It is a history of British theatre censorship, and describes the strange system by which, until 1968, the chief courtier, the Lord Chamberlain, pre-censored all plays that were to be publicly performed. The system was always mistaken, and became increasingly absurd, as, well into the Fifties, the Lord Chamberlain tried unhappily to maintain the policy that there could be no jocular portrayal of Queen Victoria or even her son (‘the play shows up King Edward VII in a tiresome light as regards girls’). Two other tough rules were that Christ or God could not be impersonated on stage (perhaps we’re going back to that one) and that homosexuality could not be mentioned. Another was that plays should not depict the current politics of foreign countries, particularly ones which were, in theory at least, friendly. In 1938, for instance, a play called Take Heed had to substitute the word ‘foreign’ for ‘Czecho-Slovakian’, ‘Vann’ for ‘Berlin’ and ‘yellow shirts’ for ‘brown shirts’. The words ‘goose-stepping’, ‘Herr’ and ‘National Socialism’ were cut throughout.

But the authors do not make the mistake of just laughing at the Lord Chamberlain and his readers. They notice that the readers’ reports, written by well-educated men for two guineas per play, were often thoughtful, well-informed and trenchant. Here is the beginning of one on Look Back in Anger: ‘This impressive and depressing play breaks new psychological ground, dealing with a type of young man I believed had vanished 20 years ago… It is about the kind of intellectual that thrashed about passionately looking for a cause.