The Lord Chamberlain regrets

[calimac]

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets: A History of British Theatre Censorship by Dominic Shellard, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley (British Library, 2004)

For over 200 years, if you wanted to put on a play in public in the UK, the script had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain, primarily an obscure royal courtier but one who had also mysteriously been saddled with this peculiar task. Lines deemed obscene or blasphemous were regularly edited out, and plays that lampooned distinguished living persons or had plots that were sufficiently risqué were not allowed on stage at all.

I've read much about this quaint practice from the p.o.v. of dramatists and theatre companies. Here's a history from the other side of the table. For much of this period, the Lord Chamberlain, who had other things to do with his time, devolved the research part of his duties to a subordinate officer called the Examiner of Plays. The Examiner would read each submitted play, and write up a report and recommendation to submit to the Lord Chamberlain for a final decision, and it's these reports, on file at the British Library, which form the basis of this study.

The principal examiner through the 1950s and 60s was a man named Charles Heriot, of whose background the text says nothing, though I've learned online that he was an actor himself, and whose reports I find bewilderingly charming. Bewildering, because he ventured far beyond his censor's remit to make sweeping critical judgments of the plays he read, and charming, because he often wrote the kind of evaluation I'd love to see in published reviews but rarely do, of the kind of tiresome modernist plays that I've left with the feeling "Why did I subject myself to this pretentious bombast?" Here's Heriot on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Once again, Mr. Williams vomits up the recurring theme of his not-too-subconscious. This is the fourth play (and there are sure to be others) where we are confronted by the gentlewoman debased, sunk in her private dreams as a remedy for her sexual frustration, and over all the author's horror, disgust and rage against the sexual act.

And on The Birthday Party:

An insane, pointless play. Mr. Pinter has jumbled all the tricks of Beckett and Ionesco with a dash from all the recently produced plays at the Royal Court Theatre, plus a fashionable flavouring of blasphemy. The result is still silly. The Emperor is wearing no clothes.

Burn, baby, burn! Although it's worth noting that, apart from advising that a few lines be cut, the reader recommended approving both these plays for performance.

But by far the most interesting comment I saw was a note appended to the report on Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956). This work is more of a major landmark in modern British intellectual history than it is a famous play. As the keystone event of the "Angry Young Man" literary movement, its premiere got a strong response discussed in detail in many books about the period, but always with a weird absence of description of the actual play itself. Curious, I once decided to see it for myself. I don't like reading unfamiliar plays in text form, but I found a tape of a tv performance starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, back when they were still a couple, as Jimmy and Alison, the married pair who are the central characters. Surely, if anybody could communicate the meaning of this play, they could.

They couldn't. I could make little sense of the plot or motivations. Jimmy and Alison are living a proletarian life in a working-class flat in Birmingham or somewhere, despite having more privileged family backgrounds, that much was clear. Jimmy spends most of the play standing around ranting about something or other, I could not figure out what. He seems just inchoately angry at the world. Much of his standing around ranting is done without his trousers on, because Alison spends most of the play ironing either Jimmy's trousers or his friends' trousers. It wasn't clear either why she's obsessed with ironing trousers or why it takes her so long. They may just both be thunderously bored; I know I was.

Anyway, Heriot's report offers a more clear and succinct summary of the plot than anything I've seen in serious literary studies, and concludes with this strange little footnote:

The prototypes of Jimmy and Alison may be Giles Romilly and his wife. Romilly was killed in the war and his biography was sketched in a book called "Friends Apart" by Philip Toynbee, published in 1954.

Now this interested me. First it was clear that Heriot miswrote himself and meant not Giles Romilly but his brother Esmond. Giles was still alive in 1956. Esmond is the one who was killed in the war and is the subject of Philip Toynbee's memoir. (Not that the book in hand takes note of this confusion.) But what really made it interesting to me is that Esmond's wife was Jessica Mitford, the one of the famous Mitford sisters who became a Communist, moved to America, and ended up as Queen of the Muckrakers, author of The American Way of Death and the exposé of the Famous Writers' School. She's one of my favorite writers, and would certainly make my top five on the list that Gay Talese couldn't think of a single name for, along with Molly Ivins, Ursula Le Guin, maybe Nora Ephron, and probably Diana Wynne Jones.

But nothing that I've read about Decca (as she was called) and Esmond, or about John Osborne for that matter, gave any indication that the couple were in any way models for the play. True, they came from privileged backgrounds (Esmond was Clementine Churchill's nephew, and Decca the daughter of a lord) which they gave up to run off and cover the Spanish Civil War and later to live in genteel poverty on the south side of London, but that's as far as the parallel goes. Jimmy is undirected and wasting his life; he's abusive to Alison, scornful of her pregnancy, and has an affair with her best friend. None of this is remotely like Esmond as I've read of him. Decca, by her own account, was a hopeless housekeeper, so no obsessive ironing, and she absolutely rejected Alison's secret desire to reunite with her family; Decca's family were mostly notable fascists, and she wanted to keep well away. In any case, Osborne's knowledge of Esmond and Decca's life, if he had any at all, was likely to have been second-hand, as he was under ten years old when they were in London.

So I found Heriot's connection implausible at best. Puzzled, I consulted two experts in the field - Peter Y. Sussman, editor of Decca's letters (a marvelous book titled simply Decca), and Meredith Whitford, author of a biography of Esmond and Decca (Churchill's Rebels, which I haven't read yet but I'm on my way to get it) - and neither of them put any credibility in it either. So I'm going to dump this note as a curiosity with probably no further significance.

Theatrical censorship in the UK was ended in the late 1960s, as part of a brief wave of civilization that also brought the decriminalization of homosexuality. One thing the book doesn't mention is that the Lord Chamberlain of the day, whenever for the rest of his life he ran into the Home Secretary who'd been responsible for initiating the change, thanked him profusely for having relieved him of this onerous duty.

Comments

[negothick.livejournal.com]

In the mid-sixties (66 or maybe 67), Playshop, the high school theater group to which nineweaving and I belonged, presented Look Back in Anger. Neither of us had roles, but I at least worked on the production. (I wrote music for "Don't be afraid to sleep with your sweetheart/ Just because she's better than you!"). We struggled with censorship: we did end up cutting some lines, but we won the battle over Alison's ironing--while wearing (horrors!) a slip. We succeeded in locating a modest and opaque slip that covered more of the actress than most fashionable dresses. But then there was . . .the toilet! We were able to locate an antique commode and bring it onstage. That was about as transgressive as it got in that time and place. . .

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Did you struggle with understanding the plot or what Jimmy was ranting about?

It's been a long time since I saw that tv production, but I recall that Emma Thompson seemed fully clothed. But I cannot imagine having a high-school girl standing in even a modest, opaque slip, or high-school boys without their trousers on, without generating unintended giggles.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

We thought we were so ultra-sophisticated, and that the plot was . . .our lives. . .wishing like anything to get out of this uncool small town where our parents (for whom the Upper Class were stand-ins) just didn't understand our immense talents. Our Jimmy wore boxer shorts--briefly. Then, as I recall, we settled on actual shorts. But it's been 50 years.
As for the audience--I do remember that it was so tiny that only the drama-besotted attended, so no giggles.

And hey, both our leads went on to become professional actors; one of the club members is now a successful Broadway producer whose shows (including Fela, Kinky Boots, and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder) have won Tony Awards. And as for me--I'm still in the same small town, doing community theater.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Let me know what you think of Churchill's Rebels. I've been curious about Esmond for a long time.

You do know that Decca lived two or three houses away from n6tqs until she died, right? My parents also knew her casually during World War II.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Will do. That'll make five books with significant material about Esmond that I'll have read, and that doesn't include his two autobiographies.

Yes, I knew Decca's address, and considering that I was still in college when I got to know her work, I could and should have made the effort to meet her, considering that we did have some mutual acquaintances, including one of my professors. But I never did.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel that the kind of deflationary comments Heriot makes were commonplaces of the film criticism I first knew and loved (often without having seen the films under review), that of Pauline Kael, John Simon, and even Stanley Kauffmann, the last of whom Simon, looking back to the film critic battles of the 1960s and 70s in his 2000 valedictory column, aptly described as a writer of "gentlemanly sobriety". Simon and Kauffmann both also wrote extensively about theater (Simon still does a little theater criticism; Kauffmann, who died three years ago, was a Shakespearean actor for most of the 1930s, wrote a number of now-forgotten plays, including a children's piece in which Marlon Brando had made his Broadway debut playing a giraffe, and was briefly the New York Times theater critic in 1966). I don't own any of Kauffmann's theater criticism, but I cracked open his first collection of movie reviews, A World on Film (1966), thinking I'd offer you some choice put-downs. However, since one of the reviews included is of the film adaptation of Look Back in Anger, which Kauffmann had also seen onstage in London and which he covers at more length than was usually the case, how about this only somewhat negative paragraph instead:

"My own view is that Look Back in Anger is a partial statement of existentialism, put in broad, biting, somewhat sophomoric terms. It is a recognition of the lonely condition of contemporary Western man--minus the additional recognition that this condition is a grave opportunity, not a final defeat. This is not to say that Jimmy and Alison ought to walk out at the end chins high and heart singing; but it is most definitely to say that their negativism has a positive base if one searches it out. To be stripped of the earthly and cosmic certainties of the past is to be lonely indeed, but it is also to be free of illusions. More mature writers than Osborne have seen with him that the released prisoner may, quite understandably, long for the haven of the cell of his fathers, for they have also seen that he has given up snug imprisonment for demanding opportunity. If there is no longer a comfy old world, there is room to make another. If there is no God, there is still man."

As it happens, this collection also includes Kauffmann's negative review of the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with some harsh words for the play: "it lacks resonance beneath its action; its writing is sometimes stilted, some of its motivations are insufficient, and its resolution is feeble". He was generally a fan of Pinter's work, but while I remember that he disliked the movie adaptation of The Birthday Party (which appeared after this collection was published), I cannot recall his thoughts on the play itself. He gives a rave here to the cinematic version of The Caretaker (also known as the The Guest), which Pinter himself adapted: having noted that Pinter's work is both loved and hated, he writes, "When we admire him, we are really admiring his ability to look into a crystal ball of the humdrum and see not the future or past, but the fantasy-cum-dread that runs parallel to the present reality." But he worries that Pinter is in danger of repeating himself.

Simon, on the other hand, regularly savaged Pinter’s work. On the occasion of Pinter winning the Nobel prize in 2005, Simon described the plays as "labyrinths without issues, leading from the tediously strained to the preposterous. What accounts for this triumph of sham? The reasons are many, but two are obvious. One is poor education, which begets a public of dupes and charlatans; another, general loss of self-confidence, despite Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary tale about the dubious fashion statement of a certain emperor."

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call Kauffmann's take on Look Back in Anger even "somewhat negative." It's the kind of wimpy apologia that I've often seen for work that the critic knows in his heart is lousy but tries to excuse on the grounds that it must be somehow Important, or Good For You.