The formal improvements won’t have frightened the Lord Chamberlain an excessive amount of, however among the songs’ lyrics would positively have had him reaching for his blue pencil, particularly these with the “four-letter phrases, specific sexual content material, rituals, medicine” talked about by Miller. Hair has its share of uplifting flower-power anthems, notably Aquarius and Let the Solar Shine In. However it additionally has its share of subversive, taboo-busting songs. Sodomy is a soulful gospel quantity that lists a wide range of intercourse acts. In Cannabis, the solid chants the names of quite a few narcotics, and two songs, Black Boys and White Boys, are cheekily lascivious paeans to inter-racial relationships. There is no such thing as a method that the Lord Chamberlain would have authorized of any of these.
Fortunately for O’Horgan, many British playwrights, producers and politicians had lengthy been questioning why one undemocratic physique might nonetheless censor so many creative endeavours. The apply dated again to 1737, when the Theatre Licensing Act was handed, largely as a result of the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, was uninterested in being caricatured in such productions as John Homosexual’s The Beggar’s Opera. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiners of Performs had the job of studying scripts and visiting theatres to make sure that nothing can be permitted to scandalise the general public – or to satirise the federal government.
Inevitably, lots of the groups’ selections had been problematic. Within the Nineteen Thirties, performs lampooning Adolf Hitler had been rejected in order to not offend the Nazi regime. Within the Nineteen Fifties, London’s Royal Court docket Theatre repeatedly clashed with the Lord Chamberlain over kitchen-sink dramas by such “indignant younger males” as John Osborne. And within the Sixties, the Royal Court docket saved looking for loopholes in order that it might stage the provocative works of Joe Orton and Edward Bond. “For a few years, we’ve not been capable of do lots of performs at this theatre within the language wherein the creator wrote them,” the Royal Court docket’s creative director, William Gaskill, advised the BBC in 1968. “There have been lots of very minor, irritating cuts of the extra virile language of performs.”
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The time had come for a change – this was, in spite of everything, the dawning of the age of Aquarius – and after years of protests, parliamentary debates and committee conferences, the brand new Theatres Act was handed. The age of the Lord Chamberlain was over. “The stage is all set for some difficult experiments,” reported the BBC. “There is not any doubt about it. Playgoers are getting into a brand new, freer period in theatre historical past. They will not have lengthy to attend earlier than these behind the scenes present simply how free they are going to be.”
