'We tell it the way it is': How 'shocking' musical Hair escaped UK censorship

The US "Love-Rock Musical" was infamous for its nude scene, but other aspects of the play were just as radical. In 1968, its director, Tom O'Horgan, told the BBC how it had fallen foul of an outdated UK censorship law that was on the verge of being abolished.

Fifty-seven years ago this week, London's theatregoers were treated to the sight of a stage full of naked actors. That would have been impossible just a day earlier. For more than 200 years, no new play could be put on in Britain unless it was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, a senior officer of the Royal Household. And nudity was just one thing that this all-powerful censor didn't allow. But the law was changed, and the Lord Chamberlain's dominion finally came to an end on 26 September 1968. The following night, Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

"We couldn't have done the play the way we're doing it prior to this time without drastic modifications," the director of the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical", Tom O'Horgan, told the BBC. One of those modifications would have been to cut the famous – or infamous – scene in which the whole cast appears on stage in no costumes except a beaded necklace or two. But O'Horgan didn't believe that the nude scene was "the major crux of the problem". In fact, the Lord Chamberlain's office had refused to license Hair in July 1968 for several reasons. "Much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play," said O'Horgan, "which are also perhaps shocking to people because we deal with the things the way they are, and we tell it the way it is."

Hair was the brainchild of two out-of-work actors, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who were inspired by the groups of young hippies they had seen hanging out in New York. Their plan was to write a musical that would put such people in the spotlight, with all their freedom, energy and anti-establishment attitudes towards sex, drugs, their parents, the government and the war in Vietnam. Galt MacDermot, a decidedly un-hippy jazz enthusiast, was hired to add music to Rado and Ragni's lyrics, and the show opened off Broadway, at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, in October 1967. The following April, it moved to Broadway's Biltmore Theatre, where it played to packed houses every night, but only after it had been overhauled, with new songs, new actors in most of the roles, and a new director (O'Horgan).

This version also introduced the scene for which Hair would become known. "A nude scene was inserted at the end of Act One that caused lots of talk – the kind that sells tickets," noted Colette Dowling in the September 1968 issue of Playbill magazine. "It also made one of the play's most forceful moral statements."

The moral statement was that youthful bodies like the ones displayed on stage every night were being clothed in uniforms and torn apart by bombs and bullets in the Vietnam War. There was nothing sexual about the scene, and the actors weren't even required to disrobe completely if they didn't want to – although the producers did stump up a $1.50-per-night bonus to anyone who was willing.

By the time Hair came to London, O'Horgan felt that the nude scene had been "greatly over-emphasised" compared to the play's other examples of radical politics. The brief tableau had "very little importance in the show itself", he told the BBC, and the play would have fallen foul of the UK's censors even without it. "I think that there are many areas of language and subjects that are approached in the show very frankly which would probably not have passed the Lord Chamberlain's [test]."

'Four-letter words and explicit sexual content' 

Some of these areas are described by Scott Miller in his book, Rebels with Applause: Broadway's Groundbreaking Musicals. "With very little plot, a unit set, plenty of four-letter words, explicit sexual content, rituals, drugs, lyrics that didn't rhyme, music that didn't follow the rules, and the sound of genuine rock and roll on the Broadway stage for the first time… the show rejected every convention of Broadway, of traditional theatre in general, and of the American musical in specific. Hair was the first impressionist Broadway musical, in which lyrics, dialogue, plot, and character were implied, suggested, abstract."

The formal innovations might not have worried the Lord Chamberlain too much, but some of the songs' lyrics would definitely have had him reaching for his blue pencil, especially those with the "four-letter words, explicit sexual content, rituals, drugs" mentioned by Miller. Hair has its share of uplifting flower-power anthems, notably Aquarius and Let the Sun Shine In. But it also has its share of subversive, taboo-busting songs. Sodomy is a soulful gospel number that lists a variety of sex acts. In Hashish, the cast chants the names of numerous narcotics, and two songs, Black Boys and White Boys, are cheekily lascivious paeans to inter-racial relationships. There is no way that the Lord Chamberlain would have approved of any of those.

Luckily for O'Horgan, many British playwrights, producers and politicians had long been questioning why one undemocratic body could still censor so many artistic endeavours. The practice dated back to 1737, when the Theatre Licensing Act was passed, largely because the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, was tired of being caricatured in such productions as John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The Lord Chamberlain's Examiners of Plays had the job of reading scripts and visiting theatres to ensure that nothing would be permitted to scandalise the public – or to satirise the government.

Inevitably, many of the teams' decisions were problematic. In the 1930s, plays lampooning Adolf Hitler were rejected so as not to offend the Nazi regime. In the 1950s, London's Royal Court Theatre regularly clashed with the Lord Chamberlain over kitchen-sink dramas by such "angry young men" as John Osborne. And in the 1960s, the Royal Court kept trying to find loopholes so that it could stage the provocative works of Joe Orton and Edward Bond. "For many years, we haven't been able to do a lot of plays at this theatre in the language in which the author wrote them," the Royal Court's artistic director, William Gaskill, told the BBC in 1968. "There have been a lot of very minor, irritating cuts of the more virile language of plays."

More like this:

• The 'obscene' banned book that became a bestseller

• The story of the first ever Glastonbury Festival

• The 1960s sex scandal that rocked British politics

The time had come for a change – this was, after all, the dawning of the age of Aquarius – and after years of protests, parliamentary debates and committee meetings, the new Theatres Act was passed. The age of the Lord Chamberlain was over. "The stage is all set for some challenging experiments," reported the BBC. "There's no doubt about it. Playgoers are entering a new, freer era in theatre history. They won't have long to wait before those behind the scenes show just how free they're going to be."

By opening Hair in London to coincide with the passing of the Theatres Act, its producers pulled off a perfectly timed publicity coup. What they offered was the most appropriate possible show to symbolise this "new, freer era" – and the perfect show for anyone who wanted to see what an uncensored night at the theatre might consist of.

"It was an event," said Anthony Lewis in the New York Times of the musical's London debut. "An extravagantly dressed audience was aroused – mostly in sympathy, but a few in outrage – by the rock rhythms and iconoclastic message of the show… The critics were divided this morning, some bored, some bothered, some genuinely pleased." 

Annabel Leventon was in the original 1968 London cast, and in 2017 she told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour how revolutionary the production was. "We danced in the aisles, sat on the audiences' laps, frightened them, and at the very end of the show we all ran out singing Let the Sun Shine In, and went back on stage and the whole audience followed us. That's when we realised the show made a greater change in Britain than anywhere else. Hair really shocked and changed the world of theatre forever."

--

For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.