The Erosion of Stage and Screen Censorship

Abstract

On 8 May 1956, six years after Shaw died, the Royal Court Theatre, which in his time was usually called the Court Theatre, gave the first performance of Look Back in Anger by twenty-six-year-old John Osborne. Its title provided a name for his generation of dramatists and novelists: angry young men. Like Shaw, they were anti-Establishment, and the invective of its protagonist, Jimmy Porter, suggested parallels with the tirades of John Tanner in Man and Superman, which had premiered at the same theatre in 1905. Unlike Tanner, who inveighed against capitalism and middle-class morality, and who championed socialism, Jimmy Porter ranted that no one had convictions or cared about anything anymore, that there were no good causes left to die for, and that death for whatever might replace what Aldous Huxley called a Brave New World, the title of his dystopian novel borrowed from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, would be as meaningless and ignoble as walking in front of a moving bus. Not since Shaw, said Nicholas de Jongh, “had there been such an agitating dramatist and agent provocateur.” Osborne confronted the Lord Chamberlain’s vetoes “with determination and fury.” Like Shaw and others, he had to alter dialogue to obtain a license for his play to be performed publicly. Among the lines that offended the Lord Chamberlain was “Thought of the title for a new song today. It’s called ‘There’s a smoke-screen in my pubic hair.’” Osborne replaced the title with “‘You can quit hanging round my counter Mildred ’cos you’ll find my position is closed,’” a joke the official apparently did not get. Look Back in Anger was licensed and shocked audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, although not usually for sexually suggestive banter. Kenneth Tynan’s review began: “‘They are scum,’ was Mr Maugham’s famous verdict on the class of State-aided university students to which Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim belongs,” and it belonged to Osborne’s protagonist too. Ironically, Amis’s 1954 novel, named for its title character, won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction the year before Look Back in Anger opened, which prompted Maugham to announce he was appalled that such a “vulgar” novel had received it. Those who share Maugham’s opinion, of whom there must be many, Tynan’s review continued, should stay away from Osborne’s play, “which is all scum and a mile wide.” He concluded, “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.” Upon reading this, I assumed that most of those he could be fond of were young, and I was younger than he and Osborne were. The Royal Court production moved to Broadway. When the box office yielded dwindling returns, its producer, David Merrick, hired a young woman to sit in the audience and appear to be so disturbed by Jimmy’s misogynistic rants that she walked onto the stage and slapped Kenneth Haigh (who played Jimmy, as he had done in London)—seemingly, an act of personal censorship. For weeks, newspapers ran the story, by which time box office proceeds rose and Merrick confessed the incident was a publicity stunt.