The thorny affair of the Rose Tattoo

In 1957, theatre producer Alan Simpson was arrested for staging The Rose Tattoo, which was considered 'objectionable'. But the court case may have had more to do with a power struggle than with the censors, writes Fergus Linehan'The case was not about The Rose Tattooat all, but had its roots in a hidden struggle between the Departmentof Justice and the Machiavellian Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John CharlesMcQuaid'

Ireland in the 1950s was a severely depressed place. Although most of the countries which had fought in the second World War were starting a steady climb into prosperity, Ireland's economy was foundering, there was mass unemployment and emigration had reached a point where it was believed by some that it would eventually lead to the complete depopulation of the country.

Culturally, it was still as isolated as it had been when it was neutral during the war, held in the grip of a reactionary church that permitted little dissent and seemed unchallenged except by a tiny minority. In the arts, films were banned or cut for reasons which today seem laughable, but literary censorship was even worse. The number of books and other publications banned was rising every year - from about 100 a year when the Censorship Board was first introduced in the 1920s to more than 1,000 at its height - and included a fair cross-section of Ireland and the world's major writers.

Only the theatre was free from state censorship, which was not to say that it was free from interference. Apart from the self-censorship which the climate encouraged, unofficial complaints were sure to follow any attempt to push the boundaries of what was produced. Unsurprisingly, Irish theatre was in low water.

One of the few exceptions to this general malaise was the tiny Pike Theatre in Herbert Lane, founded by a serving army officer, Alan Simpson, and his wife Carolyn Swift, later dance critic of this paper. Holding less than 70 people and financed in part by very successful late night revues and by the self-sacrifice of everybody involved, it managed to serve up a diet of largely international plays. Its greatest successes, however, were the first production of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow, and the Irish première of Beckett's masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, in 1955, which ended up as one of the longest-running plays mounted in Ireland until that time.

By 1957 the Pike was a highly regarded, established feature of the theatrical scene, so when the first Dublin Theatre Festival was announced, it was included in the programme. Apart from the kudos, it was an important step for the cash-strapped Simpson and Swift, as productions were guaranteed against loss. As their choice, they decided to produce The Rose Tattoo, by Tennessee Williams.

The play's plot concerns an Italian-American widow whose idealised memory of her dead husband makes her turn her back on life and love, and who is eventually forced to face up to the fact that, far from being the cherished figure of her memory, he was a wastrel who was unfaithful to her. Cleansed by the truth, she is transformed.

Even by the often bizarre standards of the time, the play seemed harmless. The text, had been available in bookshops for some time and, although the director of the Theatre Festival, Brendan Smith, had received a letter from a body of zealots styled The Irish League of Decency, complaining that the play promoted the use of "artificial birth control", the Simpsons were able to convince him that nothing was further from the truth. There was, it is true, a stage direction that a contraceptive is thrown on the stage, but in the Irish version this was mimed - because it was impossible to obtain one!

The play opened the Festival on May 12th, 1957, and from the first night was a huge success. Both the Irish and the visiting English critics raved about it, with particular praise for Anna Manahan as the widow and the young Kate Binchy as her daughter. The little theatre was packed night after night, with well-known politicians and diplomats to be seen among the audience. And then the floor fell in.

In the second week of the run, a police inspector presented himself at the theatre and informed Simpson that the play contained "objectionable passages" and, unless these were removed he and his wife would be liable for prosecution. In the climate of the time that would usually have been enough to bring the curtain down on the play, but Simpson and Swift were made of sterner stuff and, when the police refused to specify what the objectionable passages were decided to run on. Two days later, Simpson, who had alerted the press that it was about to happen, was arrested outside the theatre and taken to the Bridewell, where he spent a night.

For the next year the case dragged its way through the courts, without Alan Simpson ever actually coming to trial. In the preliminary hearing the police witnesses refused to answer questions on who had instructed them to proceed and why, claiming privilege - a claim that brought the case into both the High and Supreme courts and threatened to ruin Simpson and Swift financially. The preliminary hearing was not without its comic side, particularly when one of the police witnesses revealed that, on the second of three occasions he had seen the "obscene" play, he had brought his wife along. Eventually, the case came back to the District Court where the judge, after a scathing summing-up of the inadequacies of the police case, refused to let it go to trial and discharged Alan Simpson.

Simpson had been totally cleared but the effect on the financially vulnerable Pike was devastating. In the course of the lengthy legal proceedings, it lost half of the subscribers who kept it going and it never again achieved successes such as it had had in its early years. Eventually, it closed. Alan Simpson became a jobbing director, working a lot of the time abroad, though he did serve for a brief time as artistic director of the Abbey, and after the end of their marriage Carolyn Swift became a journalist and writer of books and for television.

Such were the facts of the inglorious story of The Rose Tattoo prosecution, but anyone looking into it in any detail has to wonder why it was ever taken in the first place. A prosecution for obscenity in a public performance had never been taken in Ireland before and the State's case, as was finally shown, was weak to the point of being non-existent. In their book Spiked, Gerard Whelan and Carolyn Swift have come up with a hypothesis which is both intriguing and plausible. The case, they argue, was not about The Rose Tattoo at all, but had its roots in a hidden struggle between the Department of Justice and the Machiavellian Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.

McQuaid, a subtle despot, rarely if ever spoke out directly in matters of censorship or other conflicts with the civil authorities. He had no need to, for his lay allies were all too eager to do his bidding and once it was perceived that he wished a certain course of action it was very difficult to stand up to him. Chief among these allies were the Knights of Columbanus, a secret society of "concerned Catholics", ranging in their politics from arch-conservative down to downright bonkers.

By 1949, the Knights had achieved covert control of the Censorship Board. Between 1950 and 1954, the board banned almost twice the number of books banned between 1930 and 1945, bringing widespread protests at home and a spate of unwelcome publicity abroad. The tide was beginning to turn against censorship and successive governments recognised it. Even the Hierarchy appear to have felt things were going too far, but any attempt to row back had to be done secretly and with delicacy to avoid the usual belt of the crozier.

By a combination of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, mainly by a civil servant, Thomas J. Coyne, Secretary of the Department of Justice, and the obduracy of the chairman of the Censorship Board, J.J. Piggott, who refused to convene the Board when a coupleof new members started to block his bigoted agenda, the Knights were eased out. The new Board was hardly liberal, but for the first time the State had managed to stand up to Church interference and win. Anticipating a backlash, the de Valera government decided it must not appear to be soft on censorship and it appears that the "Rose Tattoo" affair was thought up to show this was so.

It was probably anticipated that, at the first warning from the police, the play would close, but Simpson and Swift's brave stand meant the attempt at prosecution had to go on, thought it was never meant to succeed. That, in the process, the lives and livelihoods of two decent and talented people were ruined seems to have caused nobody in authority a second thought, but such was the Ireland of the day.

Alan Simspon used to say, tongue in cheek: "We died so that Irish theatre could be free", and certainly the "Rose Tattoo" affair dispelled the spectre of State theatre censorship for good, so something good came of it. But, the price of liberty being eternal vigilance, it's well to remember what the late Donal Foley of this paper used to say: "They'd do it again if they felt they could get away with it."

Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and The Rose Tattoo. (New Island, €14.99)