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Censorship and the Permissive Soiety: British cinema & theater 1955-1965 ANTHONY ALDGATE, 1995 Oxford, Clarendon Press pp. 171, 36 illus.; L25.00 (cloth), L9.99 (paper)
To a liberal sensibility, 'censorship' is the most offensive 'c word' of all. Attitudes towards it may well be predicated upon whether official control over artistic and critical expression is viewed as a reflection of 'normative' society or as a formulator of it (and, thus, as a hegemonic tool of social and ideological manipulation): the resulting knee-jerk response apparently defies neutral mediation. It is, therefore, an invaluable merit of Anthony Aldgate's Censorship and the Permissive Society that the author maintains a position of determined neutrality throughout his impressive account of theatre and film censorship in the long-overlooked period between 1955 and 1965.
In rejecting the popular misconception that the 'permissive' high points of 1967 or 1968 mark the crucial dates in the history of British censorship (the relaxation of theatre censorship arrived in 1968 when the the Theatres Act robbed the Lord Chamberlain's Office of its extensive powers), Aldgate proposes instead that 1959 is the essential date in this history. The legislation contained in the Obscene Publications Act, which entered the statute books in July of that year, conferred freedom from censorship upon literature; the subsequent landmark `not guilty' verdict passed on Lady Chatterly's Lover 1 year later, Aldgate argues, became involved in a broader review of film and theatre censorship and played a central role in the 'permissive' developments of the 1960s. Not that the author is prepared to endorse the myth that the decade marked a `cultural revolution' characterised by permissiveness, any more than...