Politics, prudery & perversions

"From 1737 until 1968 plays scheduled for performance in England were liable to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain's office. Before going into rehearsal and receiving a license to perform, scripts had to be submitted, read and their contents approved. The practice was finally abolished despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. The catalyst for this change in the law was the prosecution of Edward Bond's Saved." "Nicholas de Jongh, the first journalist to look at the Lord Chamberlain's files when they were opened to public scrutiny, gives a savage and often comic account of state control that 'blue-pencilled' any play which was too frank or outspoken about sex, politics and attacks on the Crown." "From the plays of Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw at the start of the century, to those of John Osborne the Edward Bond in the 1960s, de Jongh relates an engrossing narrative about how the detrimental, and often farcical, prohibitions left an indelible mark on decades of English drama."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.