So, it seems apparent that any real supervision of the theatre must
function with relation to produced plays and cannot deal with mere
unembodied and undetermined manuscripts.
Our playwright's suspicion that such supervision, if managed by a
politically appointed censor, would work foolishly, are justified by all
he has heard of such functionaries as they have worked in other fields
and in other lands. This was true of the gag which the doughty Brieux
finally pried off the mouth of the French playwright. It has certainly
been true of the mild and intermittent discipline to which the remote
and slightly puzzled Lord Chamberlain has subjected the English
dramatists. Indeed, when their mutinous mutterings finally jogged
Parliament into inspecting his activities, the Lord Chamberlain was
somewhat taken aback by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of hissing
him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw and Ibsen plays,
derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had _not_ suppressed.
And indeed, for every play which the Lord Chamberlain has suppressed,
the old playgoer of London could point to five which, had he been more
intelligent, he might more reasonably have suppressed in its place.
But after all those scuffles on the Strand do seem part of the strange
customs of a fusty-dusty never-never land. So our American playwright
turns, instead, to the purifications effected nearer home. He looks
apprehensively into the matter of the movies. As an occasional scenario
writer, he has been instructed by bulletins sent out for his guidance,
little watch-your-step leaflets which list the alterations ordered in
earlier pictures by the august Motion Picture Commission of the State of
New York. Most of them are fussy little disapprovals of language used in
the titles. You mustn't say: "I shall kill Lester Crope." Better say:
"I shall destroy the false Lester Crope" or something like that. You
mustn't say "roué." You mustn't say: "I don't like that rich old roué
hanging around you." Better say: "I don't like that rich old sport." And
when, in a moment of self-indulgence, a title-writer allowed himself
the luxury of writing "In a moment of madness, I wronged a woman," the
Censor seems to have turned scarlet and issued the following order:
"Substitute for 'wronged' the word 'offended' or something similar."
"Or something similar." Somehow, that seems to recall an old "Spanish
for Beginners" textbook which bade me not bother with the "tutoyer"
business as it would not be needed during my travels in Spain, unless I
married there "or something similar."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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