Global Insights on Theatre Censorship

Catherine O'Leary, Diego Sánchez, Michael Thompson, Diego Santos Sánchez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367737863
• eBook ISBN: 9781317500926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Theatre has always been subject to a wide range of social, political, moral, and doctrinal controls, with authorities and social groups imposing constraints on scripts, venues, staging, acting, and reception. Focusing on a range of countries and political regimes, this book examines the many forms that theatre censorship has taken in the 20th century and continues to take in the 21st, arguing that it remains a live issue in the contemporary world. The book re-examines assumptions about prohibition and state control, and offers a more complex reading of theatre censorship as a continuum ranging from the unconscious self-censorship built into social structures and discursive practices, through bureaucratic regulation or unofficial influence, up to detention and physical violence. An international team of contributors offers an illuminating set of case studies informed by both new archival research and the first-hand experience of playwrights and directors, covering theatre censorship in areas such as Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Poland, East Germany, Nepal, Zimbabwe, the USA, Ireland, and Britain. Focusing on right-wing dictatorships, post-colonial regimes, communist systems and Western democracies, the essays analyze methods and discourses of censorship, identify the multiple agents involved, examine the responses of theatremakers, and show how each example reveals important features of its political and cultural contexts. Expanding understanding of the nature and effects of censorship, this volume affirms the power of theatre to challenge authorized discourses and makes a timely contribution to debates about freedom of expression through performance.

Part I
First-Hand Experiences of Censorship

1 The Dictator’s Gift of Censorship

Fernando Arrabal (Translation and notes by Michael Thompson)

Fernando Arrabal gave a free-flowing improvised talk in Spanish at the Instituto Cervantes Centre in Dublin on 30 September 2010. In his introductory remarks, Michael Thompson described Arrabal’s plays as, among other things, ‘provocative’. It was this adjective that gave rise to the speaker’s opening tirade.

‘Provocation’: this was the first accusation made by the Franco regime to justify its censorship of my work. Provocation is the word used for self-justification by all the dictatorships, tyrannies, inquisitions, Nazis, Fascists, etc. that the world has ever seen. Let’s talk about provocation and the philosophical problem of censorship, which is very interesting. What is provocation? Let me try to define it. Provocation is an avatar of the language of inquisitors. Inquisitors have always spoken of provocation. It’s a centripetal, self-defeating act, cretinous and impossible to predict.

I have the misfortune to be the only writer in the world who knows everyone. I’ve known them all: I knew Beckett, I knew Ionesco, I was a friend of Picasso and a close friend of Dalí, I was a member of the Surrealist movement … And none of these great artists ever set out to be merely provocative. Can you imagine Samuel Beckett aiming at mere provocation? What have all my fellow writers done, all of them infinitely more interesting than I? What did Ionesco try to achieve with his theatre? What did Beckett try to achieve with his theatre? What was Marcel Duchamp aiming at with his visual revolution? And that wonderful woman who practically died in my arms (you can see her on YouTube speaking for the last time about her life) – Louise Bourgeois, probably the greatest artist in the world, who died recently in New York?¹ What have they all achieved? What have we tried to do? Why have we been accused of provocation? Why have we been called enfants terribles? All I can say is, how wonderful it is to be a child at the age of eighty! Why has this talented academic offered you such a description? He might just as well have applied it to Wittgenstein, Socrates (or rather Socrates through Plato), Shakespeare, Montaigne, or even quantum mechanics.

Have we been provocateurs? No, none of us. What have we done, then? What was I doing in the three years I was in the Surrealist group? What did I do during the time in which I created the Panic movement with Topor and Jodorowsky? What did I do to earn the highest honour of that movement? Ionesco said on receiving the award that there’s no prize or honour equal to the title of Transcendent Satrap of the College of Pataphysics – though most people have never heard of it.

Figure 1.1 Fernando Arrabal speaking at the Instituto Cervantes, Dublin (October 2010), as part of the conference Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Theatre Censorship around the World. Photo: Michael Thompson.

So what have all these friends of mine been attempting to do? Mandelbrot at the forefront of mathematics, with fractal objects; Lévy-Leblond, with quantum mechanics; or Heidegger? When Breton produced the First Surrealist Manifesto, he was doing something very simple. Bear this in mind: it was never just provocation, never that cretinous gesture that’s only of interest to publishers and film producers. What were the Dadaists and Tristan Tzara trying to achieve? What did Breton and the Surrealists try to do? What about Jarry and the College of Pataphysics? What was Andy Warhol trying to do, in those days when I visited him in his ‘factory’? And Allen Ginsberg, when he and I used to stroll around New York in bright green bloomers? Have we merely been indulging in provocation? No; we’ve been trying to spin a thread that’s a little finer, go a little further and deeper.

In 2005 I was invited (though I didn’t deserve it in the least) to go to New York to award a prize, the highest distinction there is for a mathematician, to Benoît Mandelbrot, the creator of fractals. I interviewed him, and the interview was published in Spain as well as in France. Pay attention to what Mandelbrot said to me, which is absolutely vital. I said to him: ‘Mandelbrot, it’s so exciting to meet you and to give you this prize. For me, and for anyone who has the slighest interest in mathematics, you represent renewal, the avant-garde, the dernier cri of the mathematics of today.’ And Mandelbrot looks at me and says: ‘Arrabal, if you’re looking for the dernier cri, the avant-garde, go to Euclid. Twenty-four centuries ago, Euclid knew enough to discover fractals. There’s nothing new.’ I myself know enough to create Oedipus the King but I haven’t done so. Sophocles knew enough to create The Car Cemetery² but he didn’t do so. Sophocles twenty-four centuries ago, and Fernando Arrabal more recently, what have they tried to do? To make better theatre. That’s what I’ve done all my life: try to make better theatre. Or at least a little less bad.

It’s so interesting, and absolutely crucial, what dictators and inquisitors think of us. I’ve been described in the same terms as Ionesco, Picasso, Dalí, Breton or Andy Warhol: as provocateurs. Yet they all did exactly the opposite. Obviously, it’s intolerable for tyrannies, for systems of censorship. You are all here to talk about censorship in its most brutal, bestial forms – but it can also be the greatest tribute. Yesterday, or rather the day before yesterday, the latest film about my work was premiered in Paris. In all the big French newspapers, the reviews of the film were saying this: ‘Arrabal received the only tribute that Franco – the dictatorship – could pay him without tainting him.’ That is, censorship. None of that ever made me unhappy. I never belonged to anything or anyone; I belong to Poetry.

What we want to do is go further. When I used to talk to Dalí about confusion, he would understand at once. Many people may have heard it said that Arrabal is in favour of confusion. Far from it: all my life I’ve been fanatically obsessed with precision. I’m a devotee of mathematics, I’m dedicated to chess, as were Beckett and Marcel Duchamp, as were all these great men I’ve been unfortunate enough to know – and I say ‘unfortunate enough to know’ because they were all infinitely superior to me. It’s terrible to realize how small one is next to luminaries such as these. The First Panic Manifesto shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere prank.³ Love it or hate it, like it or despise it, you should study it carefully to find out why Franco, who had powerful enemies, eminent dissident writers with conspicuous political profiles, only banned a few of their novels, the occasional play, odd passages, while in the case of Arrabal the regime banned everything he wrote. Why? It’s a mystery to me. For Arrabal is no communist, Arrabal is no anarchist, Arrabal is no socialist and Arrabal belongs to nothing and to no-one – and yet all his work gets prohibited.⁴ But what is there about Fando and Lis that means that Fando and Lis should be banned?

Confusion is something we’ve been interested in from the first moment. I’ve been interested in it, and I’ve written two manifestos on confusion. When I talk to Dalí about it, or to Marcel Duchamp or Ionesco or Beckett, they’re all fascinated. I can spend a whole afternoon playing chess with Beckett, but I can also spend a whole afternoon thinking about confusion – about odious confusion, hideous confusion. From the very beginnings of human civilization, confusion has been with us. There’s an amazing moment when you go to the Vatican – an extraordinary painting called The Academy, in which Plato appears. Plato the tyrant, the censor, invokes God. You can see him pointing upwards, as if light were going to come down from God. And at his side is Aristotle, who’s saying ‘No, the Earth: we learn from error’, and that’s what came to be known by the Greeks as ambiguity.

There’s another extraordinary thing, which is that the ones who’ll say most about ambiguity will be two twin spirits, the two great geniuses: Cervantes and Shakespeare. There’s little point in me saying it here, since you all know this better than I do. God sees all, God hears all and God confounds all. The fact is that it’s not going to be Arrabal who writes my greatest work but Cervantes. It’s a lost play called La confusa, which I hope some Spanish researcher, perhaps my friend Diego Santos Sánchez, will discover in an archive in Spain. It hasn’t been discovered, and if it doesn’t turn up I’ll write it myself one day. God has ways of showing that the main problem lies in confusion, and this is the problem that we – the avant-garde – are trying to avoid, which is what makes us unacceptable to tyranny and dictatorships. For example, it’s well known that God arranged for Shakespeare and Cervantes to die on the same day (23 April 1616), but don’t forget that God sees all, God hears all and God confounds all. The fact is that one of them died on that date according to the Vatican (Gregorian) calendar and the other according to the Anglican (Julian) calendar. That is, they did not die on the same day: confusion can be found here too.⁵

Confusion takes many forms and causes harm in many ways. We’re distressed by it and find it intolerable, and consequently engage in an endless philosophical struggle to combat it. The ubiquity of confusion comes to be defined in quantum mechanics as the ‘principle of indeterminacy’, but even this term is itself subject to confusion. It becomes ‘indeterminacy lite’, watered down into the ‘uncertainty principle’.⁶ Uncertainty, though, is indeterminacy that can be resolved. I’d like to tell you about Schrödinger’s cat to explain all this more fully, but I don’t have enough time.

This, then, is the confusion in literature and art against which we’re trying to struggle. When I said to Dalí, ‘We need to do something’, he, Avida Dollars, set up a conference to define Panic principles: chance and confusion. Chance on trial, an answer to confusion.⁷ And whom did he bring to speak at the conference? The greatest scientists in the whole world. They flew first class and stayed in five-star hotels, and Dalí paid for it all out of his own pocket.

What’s really intolerable for state censorship systems is that we belong to no-one. We belong only to Art: to Her Majesty, Poetry and to the goddess Theatre. We’re experiencing an apotheosis, living in the catacombs. Just today I was saying to one of the staff here that I was so pleased to see Time magazine’s annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world. ‘Influential’, that’s the word used by someone I respect and admire a great deal, the editor-in-chief of Time, a man who loves art and poetry. And would you care to guess, ladies and gentlemen, how many playwrights there are among the one hundred most influential men and women in the year 2010, according to a magazine that does things seriously and responsibly? How many playwrights? Zero. How many poets? Zero. How many novelists? Zero. How many essayists? Zero.⁸ How moving! How beautiful! We’re living in the catacombs, with nothing to hope for. We can’t be bought and we have nothing to sell. For many years, that same magazine featured pieces on its back page by the best poet there is in the USA today, my great friend Benjamin Ivry, but that same editor-in-chief, with tears in his eyes, had to sack him.

Another world – we’re living in another world that’s much better. And yet we’re the ones who are changing the world. When my friends developed set theory, sets appeared in the real geopolitical world. Some of these sets seemed absurd and knew nothing of mathematics, nor of poetry. Pieces came together and formed Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, the ‘Union of Southern Slavs’, was an absurdity. Copying mathematical set theory, copying the poetry of the period. Copying René Char, copying Fernando Arrabal’s grandparents, copying my poetry – which of course had not yet come into being.

If you want to understand censorship there’s no need to talk about the so-called avant-garde, because other artists have been censored. Let’s take just one example: France. France has a great novelist, Flaubert, and a great poet, Baudelaire. Both of them were censored. But that’s a glorious achievement! It’s a glory that I too share in, the glory of being the only Spanish writer who at the death of Franco was totally censored, the glory of the fact that the only Letter to General Franco in existence was mine. How is that possible? I still can’t quite believe it. When there were thousands of writers who were braver and more defiant than I, how is it that none of them wrote a Letter to General Franco? Could it be something to do with Wittgenstein, Mandelbrot, set theory and fractals? Isn’t it part of contemporary philosophy – the love of knowledge?

You all know how easy it is to caricature Francoism and other dictatorships. In fact, what’s worse than the imposition of censorship itself is the way in which artists are turned into its accomplices. Just as Lope de Vega was made a Familiar of the Inquisition, certain poets became accomplices of the dictatorship – and not only its accomplices but, much worse, its thugs and assassins. They took up pistols and began to kill, murdering political leaders. That’s the terrible thing: that the dictatorship had writers who were in the front line in the war. Why did great writers such as the author of La vida nueva de Pedrito de Andía, Rafael Sánchez Mazas (much better than his son, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio), find it necessary to become a Francoist? A man of such talent. Why did some, in Hitler’s Germany, find it necessary to support the Führer? For example, Heisenberg, about whom I’ve just been speaking, the creator of the principle of indeterminacy, a formidable genius – why did he find it necessary to throw in his lot with Hitler? That’s the worst thing, turning writers into assassins.

In the end, though, how happy we were and are! Franco is gone and I don’t have the cross and laurels of the Royal Military Order of San Fernando, but I do have the distinction of my entire output having been banned by Franco. I’d like to ask one question. What did those real Francoists do, the ones who’ve all turned into socialists and democrats, supporting Aznar? Although Aznar isn’t in charge any more, is he? Anyway, they only know one song. I’ll sing it for you: ‘Por el mar corre la liebre, por el mar corre la liebre, por el monte la sardina, tralará, por el monte la sardina, tralará’ (‘The hare runs over the sea, the hare runs over the sea, the sardine over the mountain tralala, the sardine over the mountain tralala’).⁹

I won’t trouble you any longer. I’d just like to urge you to think carefully about these issues and not allow yourselves to be fooled. But then who am I to say this? I’m nobody. I’m here to learn, to read what you’re going to write and to learn from it. In reality, I’m as much in the dark as anyone about most things. I’m searching, trying to find my way. I believe we form a small group, as my poet friends (dramatic poets and epic poets) have always found.

And one more thing. In Franco’s Spain, almost all the people in the prisons were Stalinists, people who wanted a regime like Ceauşescu’s or Stalin’s and fought for that with great courage. Yet when Franco died, I was the only writer who had been in prison. I belong to no-one, so what was I doing in prison? I was receiving a gift. I was receiving the gift that only regimes of that kind can give. The gift of censorship. I’m the Bulgakov of Spain, in a way. They wanted to sentence me to twelve years in prison. My friends (Arthur Miller, for instance, mentions it towards the end of his autobiography) were astonished. What?! Arrabal? Twelve years in prison for Arrabal? What for? For being independent.¹⁰ But how can that be? Has he published a political manifesto? No. Then they all rallied round. Among them were five footsoldiers of literature, and those five footsoldiers travelled to Madrid to defend me in the trial. Five members of the rank and file of world literature, none of whom had yet received the Nobel Prize ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Censorship and Creative Freedom
• Theatre Censorship Apparatuses: Summaries of the Systems Discussed in this Volume
• PART I First-Hand Experiences of Censorship
• PART II Censorship in Authoritarian Regimes
• PART III Censorship in Democratic States
• Conclusion: The Power of Theatre
• Contributors
• Selected Bibliography of Studies in English of Theatre Censorship
• Index