The official technologies may not have actually stressed the Lord Chamberlain too much, however a few of the tracks’ lyrics would absolutely have had him reaching for his blue pencil, especially those with the “four-letter words, explicit sex-related material, rituals, drugs” mentioned by Miller. Hair has its share of uplifting flower-power anthems, especially Aquarius and Allow the Sunlight Shine In. But it likewise has its share of subversive, taboo-busting tracks. Sodomy is an emotional scripture number that notes a range of sex acts. In Hashish, the actors shouts the names of countless narcotics, and two tunes, Black Kids and White Boys, are cheekily lascivious paeans to inter-racial partnerships. There is no way that the Lord Chamberlain would have accepted of any of those.
Fortunately for O’Horgan, numerous British playwrights, producers and politicians had long been questioning why one undemocratic body could still censor a lot of imaginative endeavours. The technique gone back to 1737, when the Theatre Licensing Act was passed, mostly due to the fact that the Head of state, Robert Walpole, was tired of being caricatured in such productions as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiners of Plays had the work of reviewing scripts and visiting theatres to ensure that absolutely nothing would certainly be permitted to scandalise the general public– or to satirise the federal government.
Inevitably, a lot of the groups’ choices were problematic. In the 1930 s, plays parodying Adolf Hitler were declined so as not to upset the Nazi regime. In the 1950 s, London’s Royal Court Theater frequently clashed with the Lord Chamberlain over kitchen-sink dramas by such “angry young men” as John Osborne And in the 1960 s, the Royal Court kept looking for technicalities so that it could organize the provocative works of Joe Orton and Edward Bond. “For many years, we have not had the ability to do a lot of dip into this theatre in the language in which the author wrote them,” the Royal Court’s artistic supervisor, William Gaskill, informed the BBC in 1968 “There have actually been a lot of very small, annoying cuts of the extra virile language of plays.”
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The time had actually come for an adjustment– this was, nevertheless, the dawning of the age of Aquarius– and after years of protests, parliamentary arguments and board conferences, the brand-new Theatres Act was passed. The age of the Lord Chamberlain was over. “The stage is all set for some difficult experiments,” reported the BBC. “There’s no question about it. Playgoers are getting in a new, freer era in theater background. They won’t have lengthy to wait before those behind the scenes show simply exactly how complimentary they’re going to be.”