THERE HAS BEEN quite a drama at the Comédie-Française this week. This flagship of French theatre has just pulled a scheduled production of a play by the prominent avant-garde Austrian, Peter Handke — best known as the co-writer of Wings of Desire. The decision was taken because Handke attended the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic. His presence was an outrage to the victims of the Serbian dictator, declared the theatre’s administrator.

Handke’s performance at the funeral was most certainly not pretty. Pronouncing himself happy to support a leader who had “defended his people”, he eulogised a tyrant on trial for genocide and war crimes. He flourished the Serb flag and, pressing forward to touch the coffin, threw a red rose upon it by way of tribute.

But does such behaviour mean that his work should be banned? This week, a chorus of voices has been raised to defend or denounce the decision. Handke’s latest play may not have been overtly political, but many concur that a man with his views should be denied a public platform. As many others, including Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian Nobel laureate, deplore an act of cultural censorship.

I think that the theatre company has made the wrong decision. Art is about freedom. Censorship is about control.

Of course, artists cannot demand a special place outside legal parameters. But neither should creativity be stifled by moral considerations. “The work of art may have a moral effect,” declared Goethe, “but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his own work.”

“I don’t want to know anything about your systems of ethics,” insisted Beethoven. “Strength is the morality of the man who stands apart from the rest.” This strength lies — at least in part — in the courage to challenge received opinions, to question orthodoxies, to test accepted truths.

Handke is by no means the first artist to have espoused unpalatable political causes. Ezra Pound was committed to Mussolini and his brand of Fascism. Yet his Cantos survive, a cornerstone of the Modernist literary canon. Wagner is vilified for his anti-Semitism, for the influence he exerted on the Nazis. And yet his compositions find audiences the world over, whether in concert hall spectaculars or in Hollywood scores. Picasso offered his enthusiastic endorsement to Stalin.

The artistic achievement lasts, triumphing over the warped opinions of its creator. And yet, even in the face of such monumental precedents, we still insist on attempting to circumscribe creativity within narrow parameters — and not least in Britain. Ours, after all, is the country whose belief in outward proprieties was outraged by Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We encouraged F. R. Leavis, who famously ranked literature according to its “moral purpose”, to exert critical control over the minds of generations of students. Now we are in the thrall of a bullying left wing that wants to corral us into the compound of political correctness. The purpose of art is not to support the underprivileged or downtrodden. That is the job of social services.

When David Hare slipped an eloquent pro-war monologue into Stuff Happens, audiences, I am told, sucked their teeth in disapproval. But the point of such work is to broaden perspectives, not to shore up our preconceptions and leave us stewing in our own prejudices.

Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, highlighted the problem only recently when he put out a call for some good right-wing plays. It got the theatre critics scratching their heads. About the only contemporary example they could come up with was David Mamet’s Oleanna, with its scathing take on feminism.

Brit Artists tend to be branded as a cheeky band of punk rebels, outlaws of a repressive Thatcher regime. But they are, in fact, quintessentially the children of Thatcher — models of the individualistic enterprise that her Government encouraged and promoted, to boot, by the ad-man art collector who ran her publicity campaigns.

It is time the art world became more politically open. It is often at its most profound when it polarises audiences. The last thing to serve victims of Milosevic’s rule is the sort of censorship that the Comédie-Française now exerts. To ban is to close down debate. The Serb dictator died and escaped his verdict. Art could reopen the trial.

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