Get 'Em Off
Girls’ Night Out by Dave Simpson
Grand Opera House, Belfast 1996
The first adult woman I ever saw naked – apart from my dear old mum in the bath, of course – was the actress who played the stable hand Jill in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Or rather, the seven actresses who played the stable hand Jill, because I saw it quite a few times.
These days the sight of live thespians leaping about in the buff is no longer the novelty it once was, but still, it’s the sort of thing that brings out the worst in those nanny-like busybodies who like to think of themselves as guardians of the nation’s morals. On stage or screen, nudity, bad language and violence are the perennially soft targets of the clean-up campaigners, but while the debate on censorship in the arts still rumbles on, it is salutary to remember that difference of opinion on this issue is nothing new and, like cellulite, is always going to be with us.
The truth of the matter is that taboos need to be rewritten for each new generation. For the playwrights of ancient Greece, incest and murder were the biggest no-nos, which is why Aeschylus and his ilk made great play with the shock tactics of having wives murdering their husbands, sons sleeping with their mothers, and endless permutations on similar themes. Oedipus is famous for committing both these sins, and at the climax of Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, blinds himself in violent expiation. (There is a theory that the stage directions here are open to interpretation. Traditionally, the character gouges out his eyes, but some modern commentators have suggested that the balls he pricks are not the orbital ones but those lower down his anatomy.)
Whatever the truth of that, two thousand years on and fifteen hundred miles west, 17th-century Britain was suffering a plague of Puritanism. The Puritans viewed the stage with such horror that they closed all the theatres in the country, and it was only with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that things got back onto a more even keel. The new king had been brought up on the continent where not only were plays full of colour and special effects, they actually allowed women on stage, a thing which was unheard of in Britian – previously young boys had always grabbed any female parts going (as it were).
The wave of rollicking Restoration comedies that resulted introduced not only in a flood of unprecedented licentiousness to the theatre but also a new breed of player, the actress, many of whom were dismissively labelled as whores even if they didn’t hop into bed with their sovereign at the drop of a peruke. Nell Gwynne is probably the most famous of these, popular with both monarch and paying customers alike, and she had the titled offspring to prove it.
By the middle of the 18th century, playwrights had become so outspoken in their criticism of the establishment that the post of Lord Chamberlain was created to censor anything put on the stage. This meant that for the next two hundred years a nation that prided itself on free speech, and was prepared to fight at least one World War in its defence, found itself at the mercy of some unelected functionary’s blue pencil. George Bernard Shaw, for one, was particularly incensed, complaining that instead of having to pay the Lord Chamberlan for the privilege of having anything contentious cut out of his works, the Chamberlain’s office should be paying him for the pleasure his works gave.
Even as late as the swinging sixties Joe Orton was getting into hot water for referring to Churchill’s private parts on stage. “What are we saying?” he asked in exasperation. “That Churchill had a big prick. I would pay someone to say that about me.”
In 1968, when the censor was finally abolished, the American musical Hair opened in London, complete with nudity, swearing and vicious political comment about Vietnam. It was followed by a slew of others from Oh! Calcutta! to Paul Raymond’s probingly sensitive Pyjama Tops, and though at first the intention was mainly to make a point, in the end it became clear that nudity, at least, was being allowed a legitimate place in the playwright’s armoury of effects.
How the acting profession feels about all this is down to the individual performer’s conscience and confidence. Keith Michell and Diana Rigg were among the earliest famous and respected names to get their kit off on stage (in Ronald Miller’s Abelard and Heloise, 1970), and one critic was moved to describe the actress as “built like a brick outhouse with insufficient flying buttresses”. If nudity on stage has any lasting effect at all, then at least it might help critics concentrate on what meaning the performers are trying to convey rather than how many goosebumps they’re sporting while they’re conveying it.