Dramatic Censorship

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Censorship, Dramatic. Specific statutory provision for theatrical censorship is now rare in democratic countries, one of the last to abolish the practice being Great Britain in 1968 (see LORD CHAMBERLAIN). In general, self-censorship is the rule, current levels of public tolerance being shrewdly, if unconsciously, assessed by writers, producers, and directors. Some governments retain the right to intervene in the interest of good order or public morality, as did the French government in the case of Genet's Les Paravents (The Screens) in 1966, and most federal countries vest powers in regional or state authorities: the nude revue Oh! Calcutta! was banned in South Australia and Victoria, and plays by Cocteau, Graham Greene, and others have been banned in the Swiss canton of Valais. Throughout the world prosecutions may be laid post hoc under laws such as those relating to obscenity, blasphemy, and libel: examples include Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo in Eire in 1957; Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band in Victoria, Australia, in 1969; the musical Hair in New Zealand in 1972. It has been rare for such prosecutions to succeed and, as the gulf widens between artistic attitudes to traditional morality and those of sections of the public, more arcane applications of common law to theatrical performances have been attempted. In 1981 a private prosecution brought against Michael Bogdanov, who had directed Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, was based on Section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, the grounds for complaint being the stage enactment of an attempted homosexual rape; the case was withdrawn before any point of law could be established.

In the United States no separate legislation on the theatre has ever existed; information can be lodged with the police after the production of a play deemed immoral or obscene, and the actors arrested on stage and taken into custody to be tried under the federal or state laws dealing with literary works as a whole. In Communist countries and military autocracies preproduction censorship is usual, the severity of scrutiny varying with current orthodoxies. Political and social heresy is the censors' main concern, although attitudes to sexual matters are often more prudish than in libertarian societies. Here, too, an awareness of prevailing levels of acceptability will tend to ensure self-censorship.

Dramatic Censorship, see CENSORSHIP, DRAMATIC.