How 'shocking' musical Hair escaped UK censorship ｜ BBC Global)

It was in 1737 that Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole instituted the Lord Chamberlain's Theatre Powers after the biting satire aimed at the government which the show contained. Today's version was one of the very last scripts to pass through his lordship's office. Today's news doesn't mean a carte blanche for the theatre. The Act sees to it that any performance depicting any general outrage to public morality like obscenity, blasphemy, defamation of character, incitement to race hatred, will be liable to criminal proceedings. Nevertheless, the stage is all set for some challenging experiments. Tomorrow, Hair, the hippie musical from America, starts its run at the Shaftesbury Theatre. In one scene, men and women in the cast appear on the stage naked. Will this sort of thing be the first post-Lord Chamberlain trend? The director of Hair is Mr Tom O'Hara. I think it's an ever-growing thing but I think what usually happens in the ways of development is that you go quite a ways in one direction then you cut back and do some other things after you have experienced them and got them out of the way then another kind of view towards them happens. I think that the scene that you're talking about is the famed nude scene which has been greatly over-emphasized. It has very little importance in the show itself and much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play which are also perhaps shocking to people because we deal with the things the way they are and we tell it the way it is as we say. But of course it's no coincidence that this is coming on the day after the Lord Chamberlain sends Japan. Well I think there is some something relative about it. We couldn't have done the play the way we're doing it prior to this time without drastic modifications. I don't think that that particular scene was the major crux of the problem. I think that there are many areas of language and subjects that are approached in the show very frankly which would probably not have passed the Lord Chamberlain's. The Royal Court Theatre in London has had more than its share of battles with the censor. What practical difference will the act make there? William Gaskell is the artistic director. Well it's going to mean we can do plays as they are written for many years. We haven't been able to do a lot of plays of this theatre in the language in which the author wrote them. There have been a lot of very minor irritating cuts of the more virile language of plays. I think this is going to make a very important difference to us from that point of view and certainly won't run us into any difficulties of prosecution because I think the things that he would object to are not the things that an ordinary member of the public would object to. In what way does this differ from the ideal world that you people in the theatre would like? Well I mean we are still liable to prosecution. Perhaps we should be in certain ways but we're still liable to prosecution for obscenity for instance. I personally don't believe that there is any such thing as obscenity or if there is it's in the eye of the beholder. I would like all to see a much bolder political confrontation that there should be more political satire in which there has always been very strict censorship and the censor was created originally because of satire of the prime minister of that time and if I had one hope it would be that writers would now at last write some really strong political satires.