Less mention, funnily enough, was made of her co-star Iain Glen’s nudity, despite him quite literally performing cartwheels in the buff. The Telegraph’s critic Charles Spencer, in an oft-quoted review, described her performance as “pure theatrical Viagra”.
The young Hollywood star had to get dressed on stage, allowing a salivating audience (it was very, very sold out, with tickets exchanging hands for £1,000) to get a glimpse of her bare backside. And on – it ran for a decade in the West End.Ī sexually-charged British stage production also proved ‘life-changing’ for Nicole Kidman: she made her debut at the Donmar Warehouse in 1998 in The Blue Room, David Hare’s adaptation of Le Ronde. But an expert panel, made up of headmistresses, a vicar and a law professor, were secretly sent to see the show they found its wobbly bits harmless, and the show went on. Undercover coppers went to see the nude romp three times (was that really necessary?), and called for the Attorney General to close the show. Even at the time, its tittering titillation was seen by many as old-fashioned rather than sexually liberating – but the show also caused a serious scandal, seen by conservative commentators as a symptom of the moral degradation ushered in by the swinging ‘60s.Īmid a press furore, there were demands for it to be shut down – led by the right-wing Dowager Lady Birdwood, who called it ‘grossly obscene’. It was conceived as a money-making bit of mischief by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan he enlisted the likes of Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard and John Lennon to add an avant-garde air to his juvenile joke. Hair was an instant hit – even if the nudity, as well as the show’s explicit scenes of drug-taking and its anti-Vietnam War message, angered some critics.Īnother show to take advantage of the end of censorship was the revue Oh! Calcutta!, which in 1969 staged bawdy sketches and erotic dances, after the entire cast stripped off in the first scene. The hippy rock-musical saw the cast get their kit off at the end of the first half, emerging in the altogether from beneath a giant sheet. And the musical suggests that during WWII, beleaguered Brits were buoyed by the sight of bosoms, a show-must-go-on defiance equating to the plucky British ‘Blitz spirit’. Yes, there is full-frontal nudity – even if the men in the cast have to bare-all first, in a token nod to gender equality. This story was told in the British film Mrs Henderson Presents, starring Judi Dench, in 2005 now, it’s shimmied onto the stage in London in an all-new musical version by Terry Johnson.
Bare bottoms, it turned out, meant bums on seats – and the theatre was the only one not to close during World War Two. The Windmill soon became the most popular theatre in town, its static, classical tableaux of de-robed lovelies proving more of a draw than any song-and-dance routine.
So twigged Mrs Laura Henderson, owner of an ailing West End theatre in the 1930s – and she also got around the stage censor by promising that her cast of nude young ladies wouldn’t move a muscle. There’s nothing like the promise of naked flesh to shift tickets.
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