Frankly my dear, who gives a damn anymore?
Audiences are immune to shock tactics of old
‘If you have never seen a nude boy from the front, bring a flashlight’
In Jerry Springer, The Opera, the character of Satan, addressing Jesus, sings a song consisting purely of the words ‘f *** you.’ To which Jesus, dressed only in a nappy, wittily replies,
‘f *** you.’ The show was a cornucopia of crudities and irreverence, but there wasn’t a murmur of disapproval from the audience, although some of them hee-hawed like jackasses at the wit of it all. I’ve heard that a few people left but I didn’t notice them myself. It was a crass piece of rubbish, but it did raise the question of what it takes now to offend theatre audiences.
Expletives nowadays are so common and acceptable on and off stage, that most interviews in print with footballers, actors or politicians don’t seem to be complete without a quota of beeps and asterisks. We’ve even had a sprinkling of four-letter outbursts recently in that holy of holies, Dáil Éireann.
It’s a long way from the time Eliza Doolittle caused gasps by uttering, ‘Not bloody likely’ in the first production of Shaw’s Pygmalion, and some Irish audiences got highly indignant about Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World referring to ‘a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts.’ And even by 1939, Clark Gable had to say, ‘Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn’, to Scarlett in
Gone With The Wind, with the emphasis on give, to get by the American censor.
The only person who had a problem with the recent American play The Motherf ***** r With The Hat was the author Stephen Adly Guirgis. He couldn’t get broadcast publicity for the play because TV and radio stations are touchy about upsetting their sponsors, and didn’t want to have the show named on air, but Guirgis wouldn’t change the name. The play itself was a bareknuckle brawl of language, but it was such a serious production about drug abuse that the rough language seemed perfectly natural, and there was no stupid guffawing from the stalls.
In recent years, when obscenities or nudity got people worked up, they haven’t been inclined to holler and shout, but some of them complained to Joe Duffy on Liveline. A novel twist on that was when one critic complained (rightly) that a pantomime had too much ‘queer humour.’ This time it was not the audience, but the producers of the show who took umbrage on Liveline, at the use of the word ‘queer’, although by then it had almost become a title of honour.
Nudity lost its shock value a long time ago. The musical
Hair was, of course, a trendsetter for bawdiness, when it was first produced in 1967, with its language, nudity, and irreverence towards religion, the Stars & Stripes and everything the US held sacred, although the nudity was quite brief. One unimpressed critic wrote: ‘If you have never seen a nude boy before, from the front! and you don’t mind bringing a flashlight, (suddenly the stage gets very, very dark) then go along.’
The Full Monty, on the other hand, didn’t lower the lights. Quite the opposite, but with the same effect. A blast of backlighting from behind the actors meant that few of the audience could see anything on stage for the few seconds the bare bodies were on view.
Until the 1960s nudity on stage was illegal in Britain, but there was a loophole. Nudes were allowed, provided the performers didn’t move, as in art studios. In stripper clubs and in theatres like London’s Windmill, women would stand still as soon as they had whipped off the last flimsy garment.
Sometimes a group of women would be bunched artistically behind a screen, even taking poses from famous paintings, then the screen would be pulled back dramatically, revealing all.
The tricky bit was keeping the girls absolutely still for more than a few seconds. Occasionally there were plain-clothes cops in the audience, ready to pounce on any movement.