Abstract
A new hysteria is creating bullying tactics in the theatre. Police should do more to protect and defend our right to attend controversial plays and works of art, argues award-winning actor
The theatre and suppression are, of course, old acquaintances. Theatres are by definition public assemblies which always make authority anxious. Ideas, it seems, are a hundred times more volatile when expressed from a stage. The first fully fledged British theatre censor was Sir Edmund Tilney, Elizabeth I’s Master of the Revels, whom I had the pleasure of impersonating in the film Shakespeare in Love: not only did he arrange her entertainment, he had wide-ranging powers to scrutinise plays for sedition and possible diplomatic offence. In 1597, he caused Ben Jonson and a group of fellow dramatists to be imprisoned for writing the satirical play The Isle of Dogs. One hundred and fifty years later, Tilney’s general remit was formalised into an Act of Parliament: in 1737, goaded by Henry Fielding’s vicious onstage lampoons of him, the then Prime Minister Robert Walpole introducing the Licensing Act, giving government ultimate authority over theatres and the work they performed. The act’s provisions – which were of enormous scope, covering offence to individuals, to religion, to the monarch – remained in force until 1968, when, under sustained assault from all sides, the Theatres’ Act specifically and formally abolished official censorship in the theatre.
Once the state stepped back, from time to time private individuals and organisations tried to force their views on the public by using existing legislation for purposes for which it had never been intended, most notoriously in 1980, when the public morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse invoked the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 to try to close down the National Theatre’s production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain. A scene in the play showed a British druid being raped by a Roman soldier, an almost too obvious metaphor for what Britain was, according to the author, doing to Ireland; Whitehouse and her cohorts (who were evidently oblivious to the political dimension of the play) secured a writ against the play’s director Michael Bogdanov alleging that he had procured an act of gross indecency between the two actors; had he been found guilty he would have been liable to up to three years in jail.
In the event the case was abandoned amid widespread derision when the prosecuting counsel withdrew. Various taboos and shibboleths quietly melted away. In the 1990s, also at the National Theatre, the Queen was represented on stage for the first time, in Alan Bennett’s Single Spies, which pleasurably ruffled a few feathers but caused no outrage.
Police stand by at a silent outside performance by Incubator Theatre, after their show was cancelled because of anti-Israel protests, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014
Credit: The List
From now on, it was assumed that pretty much anything went, as long as it didn’t break the law. Again at the National Theatre, as if to demonstrate the proposition, Nick Hytner chose to open his regime in 2003 with Jerry Springer: The Opera, a veritable carnival of blasphemy and profanity, which played to packed houses despite solid picketing from deeply offended Christians, who nonetheless confined their protest to distributing leaflets and singing hymns.
In Birmingham a year later, the normally low-profile Sikh community showed no such restraint when confronted with the play Behzti, which featured scenes of rape and murder in a Sikh temple. Though the author was a young Sikh woman – perhaps because the author was a young Sikh woman – a huge, noisy and dangerous protest, barely contained by the police, was mounted outside the theatre; on the third performance the demonstration spilled over into an attempted occupation of the theatre, causing the play to be abandoned. The following day, all further performances of the play were cancelled after consultations between the local authorities and the theatre. The author went into hiding; the play was never performed again in this country. An uneasy precedent was set: if you protest violently enough, you will win.
At the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a group of demonstrators coming from an entirely different part of the spectrum from the anti-Behzti faction seemed to prove the point when they forced the closure of The City, a non-political play performed by the Jerusalem-based theatre company Incubator, whose programme is avowedly pluralistic, and whose company includes non-Jewish actors. The picketers, who were protesting against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, had no quarrel with the play: it was the fact that the company was partially state-funded by the Israeli government that condemned it in their eyes. The protesters harassed ticket-holders alarmingly, which prompted the venue and Police Scotland to announce that future performances would be cancelled because “the logistics of policing and stewarding” made it “untenable for the show to continue”. What about the logistics of free speech? This is the Police Scotland who steward the famous Rangers/Celtic derbies, keeping the peace among thousands of over-excited fans. A small protest outside a theatre, one might have imagined, would be a stroll in the park for them.
The producers were unable to find another venue in the city; game, set and match to the protesters. Shortly afterwards, the Jewish Film Festival was forced to withdraw from the Tricycle Theatre after a disagreement over funding from the Israeli Embassy. In both cases, the protest was not against the art, but about the funding.
Then in September a work of art itself, produced in London by The Barbican, was attacked head on. An almost universally acclaimed theatre installation called Exhibit B, created by the white South African artist Brett Bailey, in which the humiliations meted out to slaves were reconstructed in order to give the spectator a direct sense of how profoundly demeaning the experience was, was violently picketed by a group of mainly black protesters. Again, after taking police advice about public safety, The Barbican’s staff felt they were left with little option but to close the show.
Protests and picketing of theatres will always be with us: they are legal and legitimate, and indeed, in the case of Behzti and Exibit B, they are a testimony to the depth of emotion and public discussion that the theatre can provoke. The new hysteria that is increasingly dominating political discourse has produced a particularly nasty outcrop of bullying tactics in the theatre, sometimes, alas, from theatre practitioners themselves, especially in the area of anything concerning Israel, a country with whom we are not at war and with whom we have full diplomatic relations. But the refusal of the police to accept responsibility for ensuring the safety of theatre goers who want to see plays or events which are perfectly legal is a fundamental threat to freedom. So far they have failed to articulate their position. Do they think this is small beer, compared to a march or a rally or a riot? Or a football match, where they are so much in evidence? Surely it is the primary duty of the police to preserve the citizens’ right to pursue their lawful activities unmolested?
This concerns all of us, of whatever persuasion, because let no one imagine that protests of this sort are the exclusive preserve of the left: in the current dodgy climate, we can confidently expect right-wing and religious fundamentalist protests which are likely to be every bit as aggressive, if not more so.
Tense, dangerous times for the theatre. And not just the theatre. It is, as John Osborne so brilliantly remarked, a minority art with a majority influence. Where theatre leads, the rest of the world often follows. So it behooves us to keep a very sharp eye on these developments.