All this points to the transfer of the control of theatres from the
Lord Chamberlain to the municipality. And this step is opposed by
the long-run managers, partly because they take it for granted that
municipal control must involve municipal censorship of plays, so that
plays might be licensed in one town and prohibited in the next, and
partly because, as they have no desire to produce plays which are in
advance of public opinion, and as the Lord Chamberlain in every other
respect gives more scandal by his laxity than trouble by his severity,
they find in the present system a cheap and easy means of procuring
a certificate which relieves them of all social responsibility,
and provides them with so strong a weapon of defence in case of a
prosecution that it acts in practice as a bar to any such proceedings.
Above all, they know that the Examiner of Plays is free from the
pressure of that large body of English public opinion already alluded
to, which regards the theatre as the Prohibitionist Teetotaller
regards the public-house: that is, as an abomination to be stamped out
unconditionally. The managers rightly dread this pressure more
than anything else; and they believe that it is so strong in local
governments as to be a characteristic bias of municipal authority. In
this they are no doubt mistaken. There is not a municipal authority
of any importance in the country in which a proposal to stamp out
the theatre, or even to treat it illiberally, would have a chance of
adoption. Municipal control of the variety theatres (formerly called
music halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the one
particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That
particular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent and an
undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to actual experience,
which proves abundantly that naked or apparently naked figures, whether
exhibited as living pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are
at their best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas
those actresses and skirt dancers who have brought the peculiar
aphrodisiac effect which is objected to to the highest pitch of
efficiency wear twice as many petticoats as an ordinary lady does,
and seldom exhibit more than their ankles. Unfortunately, municipal
councillors persist in confusing decency with drapery; and both in
London and the provinces certain positively edifying performances have
been forbidden or withdrawn under pressure, and replaced by coarse and
vicious ones. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the Lord
Chamberlain would have been any more tolerant; but this does not alter
the fact that the municipal licensing authorities have actually used
their powers to set up a censorship which is open to all the objections
to censorship in general, and which, in addition, sets up the objection
from which central control is free: namely, the impossibility of
planning theatrical tours without the serious commercial risk of having
the performance forbidden in some of the towns booked. How can this be
prevented?