THE panning given to the taboo-breaking theatre of the 1950s and 1960s has been revealed in the first publication of reports by Britain’s now-defunct stage censors.

According to the assessments, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was “an insane and pointless play”. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett was described as “an interminable verbal labyrinth” while Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had Tennessee Williams “vomiting up the recurring theme of his not-too-subconscious where the gentlewoman is debased”.

The office of the lord chamberlain vetted every new play before it could be staged in Britain until 1968. The censors, often ex-servicemen, could recommend cuts before a performance licence was given or a total ban.

“These readers were mainly ex-military and naval types who were seen as a safe pair of hands and the sort who would uphold the law of the land,” said Dominic Shellard, coauthor of The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, published this week by the British Library.

The reports trawled through by Shellard, head of English at Sheffield University, include their original cuts and amendments marked in blue pencil.

The censors’ remit was to uphold the law — which forbade blasphemy and homosexuality — and keep plays off the stage that might have outraged public sensibilities.

Their opinions over what was permissible were often highly subjective. A fortnight before The Birthday Party was to be premiered at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in April 1958 the reader, C D Heriot, made it clear what he thought of the work. “An insane, pointless play. Mr Pinter has jumbled all the tricks of Beckett and Ionesco with a dash from all the recently produced plays from the Royal Court, plus a fashionable flavouring of blasphemy. The result is still silly.” Heriot censored some blasphemy.

Other plays that caught the eye of the censors included John Osborne’s “impressive and depressing” Look Back in Anger. Swear words and references to pubic hair were cut.

Another reader — St Vincent Troubridge, a descendant of Lord Nelson — did not think much of The Caretaker, also by Pinter. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” he argued. Troubridge’s blue pencil cut some “piss offs” and “bugger it”.

In 1955 Troubridge also called for 12 cuts in Waiting for Godot. Beckett agreed to replace one “fart” with a “belch”.

The row over Waiting for Godot rumbled until later that year with Peter Hall’s production in London. The lord chamberlain sent Heriot to see it. “The general feeling seemed, like mine, to be one of complete boredom — except for a sprinkling of young persons in slacks and Marlon Brando pullovers with (according to sex) horsetails or fringes, who applauded pointedly,” he wrote.

Hall remembers several run-ins with the censors, including one over Beckett’s Endgame. “There was the line ‘God, the bastard. He doesn’t exist’,” said Hall. “The lord chamberlain really objected to that one.”

Until 1958 there could be no reference to homosexuality on stage, but that year the Earl of Scarborough, then lord chamberlain, wrote, “because homosexuality has become a topic of almost everyday conversation, its exclusion from the stage can no longer be defended as a reasonable course”.

By the mid-1960s the lord chamberlain’s days as theatre censor were numbered. Edward Bond’s Saved, where a baby is battered to death in a pram, was passed in 1965, albeit with cuts.

The following year, however, the lord chamberlain was advised by a reader that US, a play about the American role in Vietnam, was “a piece of hysterically subjective anti- Vietnam propaganda”.

Before its approval Hall, then artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was summoned to see Lord Cobbold, then lord chamberlain. Cobbold “made it clear how wrong he thought it was for a play to attack what he called our best friend”, said Hall. “I then told him about free speech.”

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