Mrs Henderson Presents, a new film about the famous Windmill Theatre in London’s Soho, opens in cinemas across the country tonight. Judi Dench plays Mrs Henderson, an eccentric and wealthy widow, who went into partnership with producer Vivian Van Damm to revive the ailing genre of music hall and variety, hard hit by the talkies. She took over the lease of a run-down cinema, converted it for stage performances, and attracted the punters by presenting nudes for the first time on the British stage.
Ever since 1737, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had exercised powers of stage censorship. Every theatrical performance had to be licensed, to ensure that standards of taste, decency and respect for the Christian religion were maintained. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome was banned in 1893 on the grounds that Biblical characters could not be represented on the stage. Topics such as homosexuality could not even be hinted at, and bad language was suppressed. Nudity was out of the question.
Laura Henderson and Vivian Van Damm got round the Lord Chamberlain’s office by arguing that galleries are full of statues of naked women, and that a stationary nude woman on the stage was no more erotic than that. Amazingly, this specious argument was accepted, and nude girls featured in the shows at the Windmill, which went under the generic title of Revudeville, from 1932 until its closure in 1963. The shows still had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, but so friendly were the officials that they would ring to say when the inspector was on his way over. On one occasion a nude sneezed, and on another a dancer knocked one of the girls off her podium. On both occasion there were stern letters from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, warning them that the girls must on no account move. As long as that rule was adhered to, the Lord Chamberlain was satisfied. During the war the Windmill was regarded as an important contribution to the war effort, keeping up the spirits of the troops home on leave. It was the only London theatre not to close during the Blitz, and its proud slogan ‘We Never Closed’ was easily transmuted into ‘We Never Clothed’.
The Windmill was eventually closed not by the Luftwaffe or the Lord Chamberlain but by competition from strip clubs. Someone realised that a show in a members-only club did not require a license for public performance, so anything was allowed. The discreet, dimly-lit, stationary ladies at the Windmill could not compete with all the bumping and grinding.
Then, in 1967, the Lord Chamberlain’s powers of stage censorship were removed. The next day, the musical Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre, closely followed by The Boys In The Band, the first play about homosexuality. Most people attending the theatre today would have no idea that the government ever interested itself in the suppression of obscene, seditious or blasphemous material on the stage.
However, there are worrying signs that a new sort of stage censorship is emerging, not from the government but from the politically correct gatekeepers of the culture. This new censorship is not concerned with rude words or disrespectful references to the royal family, but with religious and cultural issues which might cause offence to certain communities. Needless to say, Christianity does not figure in the list of targets which must be avoided. On the contrary, the National Theatre is now not so much a temple of Shakespeare as a temple of blasphemy, with two Christmas seasons of His Dark Materials under its belt, not to mention Jerry Springer the Opera and Howard Brenton’s feebly sixth-form polemic against St Paul currently in the repertoire. No, the religious and cultural sensibilities which must be protected now are those of other ethnic groups.
Last year the play Behzti at the Birmingham Rep was closed as a result of violent protests by Sikhs which drove the author into hiding. There was no question of official censorship here. No public authority had told the theatre to curtail its season, but the lesson was learned and internalised. This week we discovered that scenes and lines had been cut from the Bristol Old Vic production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great at the Barbican, in case they offended Muslims. Derogatory references to Mahomet and the burning of the Koran were considered unacceptable as a result of the July bombings.
If the great classics of literature now have to go through the shredding device of modern multiculturalism, it will become increasingly difficult for modern readers and theatregoers to experience great art in the original. Perhaps we need a new Mrs Henderson to take over the lease of a West End theatre and put on full-frontal, explicit classics, under the marquee We Never Censored.