Notes Introduction 1. I witnessed the demonstrations against Terrence McNally’s play, Corpus Christi, in 1999 at Edinburgh’s Bedlam Theatre, the home of the University’s student theatre company. But these protests were not taken seriously by any- one I knew: acknowledged as a nuisance, certainly, but also judged to be very good for publicity in the competitive Festival fringe. 2. At ‘How Was it for You? British Theatre Under Blair’, a conference held in London on 9 December 2007, the presentations of directors Nicholas Hytner, Emma Rice and Katie Mitchell, writers Mark Lawson, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Tanika Gupta and Mark Ravenhill, and actor and Equity Rep Malcolm Sinclair all included reflection upon issues of censorship, the policing of per- formance or indirect forms of constraint upon content. Ex-Culture Minister Tessa Jowell’s opening presentation also discussed censorship and the closure of Behzti. 3. Andrew Anthony, ‘Amsterdammed’, The Observer, 5 December 2004; Alastair Smart, ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, The Sunday Telegraph, 10 December 2006. 4. Christian Voice went on to organise protests at the theatre pro- duction’s West End venue and then throughout the country on a national tour. ‘Springer protests pour in to BBC’, BBC News, 6 January 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4152433.stm [accessed 1 August 2007]. 5. Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Loyalist Paramilitaries Drive Playwright from His Home’, The Guardian, 21 December 2005. 6. ‘Tate “Misunderstood” Banned Work’, BBC News, 26 September 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/entertainment/arts/4281958.stm [accessed 1 August 2007]; for discussion of the Bristol Old Vic’s decision, see Ian Shuttleworth, ‘Prompt Corner’, Theatre Record, 25.23, 6 December 2005, pp. 1479–1480. 7. See David Edgar, ‘Shouting Fire: Art, Religion and the Right to be Offended’, Race & Class 48.2 (2006), 61–76 (p. 70); Steven Winn, ‘As Germans Cancel Mozart Opera, Arts World Shudders’, The San Francisco Chronicle, 30 September 2006; Nick Cohen, ‘Yet Again We Cave Into Religious Bigots. And This Time They’re Hindus’, The Observer, 28 May 2006; Anjum Katyal, ‘Summer of Discontent: Religion, Censorship and the Politics of Offence’, Index on Censorship 35.4 (2006), 157–161. 8. These powers were granted in the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, the 2003 UK–US Extradition Treaty and the 2005 Prevention of Terror- ism Act, respectively. See Patrick Wintour and Alan Travis, ‘Brown Sets Out Sweeping but Risky Terror and Security Reforms’, The Guardian, 26 July 2007. 9. See Henry Porter and Tony Blair, ‘Britain’s Liberties: The Great Debate’, The Observer, 23 April 2006; ‘Britain is “Surveillance Society” ’, BBC News, 2 November 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm [accessed 168 Notes 169 2 August 2007]; K. Ball, S. Graham, D. Lyon, C. Norris and C. Raab, A Report on the Surveillance Society, ed. by David Murakami Wood (Wilmslow, UK: Office of the Information Commissioner, 2006). 10. Mark Wallinger’s exhibition, State Britain, mounted at the Tate Britain in 2007, recreated anti-war protestor Brian Haw’s banners which were lined up in Parliament Square until they were confiscated by police in the middle of the night in May 2006. A line across the gallery’s floors highlighted the limits of the ‘exclusion zone’ around Parliament. 11. George Monbiot, ‘Protest is Criminalised and the Huffers and Puffers Say Nothing’, The Guardian, 4 October 2005. 12. ‘Muslim Cartoon Row Timeline’, BBC News, 19 February 2006, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4688602.stm [accessed 1 August 2007]. 13. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Struggle to Defend Free Expression is Defining Our Age’, The Guardian, 5 October 2006. 14. Salman Rushdie, ‘Coming After Us’, in Free Expression is No Offence, ed. by Lisa Appignanesi (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 21–26 (p. 24). 15. Frederick Schauer, ‘The Ontology of Censorship’, in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. by Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), pp. 147–168 (p. 147); Timothy Murray, Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video and Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 219. 16. Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1967); Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. viii; Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968: 1900–1932, Vol. 1 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003). John Johnston’s book, The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990) is the exception to this rule, whilst Nicholson’s approach is, in fact, more complex than his dedication would suggest. His engagement with the detail of the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing system occasionally leads him to view its decisions and judgements sympathetically (see pp. iv, 187, 215). For further discussion of Johnston’s work, see Helen Freshwater, ‘The Allure of the Archive’, Poetics Today 24.4 (Winter 2003), 729–758. 17. Nicholas Harrison, Circles of Censorship: Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 210. 18. See Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘No Religion is Immune from Criticism’, The Independent, 20 December 2004. 19. Rowan Atkinson, ‘The Opposition’s Case’, in Free Expression is No Offence,ed. by Lisa Appignanesi (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 59–63 (p. 60). 20. It must be noted, however, that Dworkin did continue to assert that this statement should not be ‘taken as an endorsement of the widely held opin- ion that freedom of speech has limits’. Ronald Dworkin, ‘Even Bigots and Holocaust Deniers Must Have Their Say’, The Guardian, 14 February 2006. 21. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), 52, cited in John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 149. 22. See, for example, David Edgar, ‘Rules of Engagement’, The Guardian, 22 October 2005; Frank Fisher, ‘Take that article down. In Index 170 Notes it’s disgraceful’, Index on Censorship, 22 November 2004, http://www. indexonline.org.uk/news/20041122_netherlands.shtml [accessed 26 October 2006]. John Durham Peters demonstrates that this form of reductive refer- ence is common in many of today’s debates over freedom of speech, where single phrases regularly stand in for longer tracts. See, for example, ‘Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple’ (John Milton); ‘Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant’ (Louis Dembitz Brandeis); and last but not least, ‘I Detest What You Say, but I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It’ (E. Beatrice Hall, usu- ally wrongly attributed to Voltaire). John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss, pp. 144–145, 156–157. 23. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 22. 24. Critical assessments of this declaration have pointed to the anti-theatricality contained within Austin’s assertion. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example, cites the dictionary meaning of ‘etiolation’, as she notes: ‘the pervasive- ness with which the excluded theatrical is hereby linked to the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the dis- eased [ ...] inseparable from a normatively homophobic thematics of the “peculiar”, anomalous, exceptional, non-serious.’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Alan Parker, eds., Performativity and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 4–5. 25. Janelle Reinelt, ‘The Limits of Censorship’, Theatre Research International 32.1 (2007), 3–15 (p. 3). 26. See Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (London: Harvester, 1980), pp. 92–108. 27. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 28. Ibid., pp. 202–203. 29. See Judith Butler, ‘Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor’, in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. by Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), pp. 247–259 (p. 258). 30. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 127. 31. Judith Butler, ‘Ruled Out’, pp. 248, 251–252. As Butler acknowledges, this understanding of censorship as productive, rather than straightfor- wardly repressive is informed by Michel Foucault’s work on the rela- tionship between power and knowledge and, specifically, his critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, which he set out in The History of Sexuality. 32. See Rae Langton, ‘Subordination, Silence, and Pornography’s Authority’, in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. by Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), pp. 261–284 (p. 261). 33. See Robert C. Post, ed., Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regu- lation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), p. 4. 34. Judith Butler, ‘Ruled Out’, p. 249. Notes 171 35. Marie Stopes, A Banned Play and a Preface on Censorship (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielsson, Ltd, 1926) and Pam Brighton, quoted in Amelia Gentleman, ‘Dubble Trouble’, The Guardian, 5 August 1999. 36. John Johnston provides an explanation of the historical background to this system in The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil. 37. See Nicholas de Jongh, Politics, Prudery and Perversions, pp. 136–137. 38. Steve Nicholson also shows that the Lord Chamberlain approached Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald directly in 1924. See The Censorship of British Drama, Vol. 1, p. 255. The Advisory Board was set up following the 1909 Parliamentary inquiry into theatre censorship, and its members were all establishment figures. Some had a particular interest in the theatre, but many had no such qualification.