A new look at the Pike Theatre censorship mystery

You can't go back, they say. And nor, we might add, would you want to. But as forward-leaning as much of its programme has proved this year, for its 50th anniversary the Dublin Theatre Festival had to pay regard to its origins. As Mary says in A Long Day's Journey into Night, "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too."

Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, given its English-language premiere by Carolyn Swift and her husband Alan Simpson's tiny Pike Theatre on May 12th, 1957, was not only the opening performance of the first Dublin Theatre Festival, but also its earliest controversy. An immediate critical and popular success, that famously led to Simpson's arrest and charge for "producing for gain an indecent and profane performance", it is temping to conceive of the production and the year-long legal battle that followed it as either a dark romance of brave artistic stands taken against State censorship, or an equally simplistic illustration of a culturally backwards and politically suffocated Ireland. The truth, as Jocelyn Clarke's verbatim drama The Case of the Rose Tattoo outlines, is more complicated.

Commissioned by the festival and given four rehearsed readings, under Tom Creed's direction, as a work in progress - in such vigorous progress, in fact, that 40 minutes had been excised between the first and second readings - the presentation was an elegant solution to a thorny question: how do you create something of the moment that properly honours the past? A less considered approach might have been to simply read or even stage The Rose Tattoo, nudging at the substance of the controversy without ever giving animation to its political consequences. Another might have been to confine discussions of the controversy to any number of academic conferences, explaining the context without realising the flavour of performance.

CLARKE'S DOCUDRAMA - its text assembled from court records, biographical material, newspaper cuttings and the Pike Newsletter - admirably attempted to do both, delivering the context of the times and the verve of performance by interpenetrating Williams's scenes of Latin-American sultriness with the alternately defiant, beaten and at times mordantly funny words of the Pike's protagonists. When Carolyn Swift's Pike Newsletter notes that the play's conflict between religious mores and moral reputations "should appeal in particular to an Irish audience", the laugh it elicits today is both knowing and sour.

The title could just as easily be "The Mystery of the Rose Tattoo", such are the unanswered questions still surrounding the State's dogged pursuit of Simpson on the most diaphanous evidence. On the second week of the play's run, when it had already been glowingly reviewed in the Irish media and, perhaps more significantly, in the pages of the London press, a police inspector informed Simpson that the play contained "objectionable passages", which, if not removed, would make him and his wife liable for prosecution.

The passages were never identified, although it was easily understood that one scene in Williams's play, in which the stage directions call for a condom to fall from a character's pocket, was likely to prove particularly contentious in a country that banned unnatural methods of birth control. To get around this, the scene was mimed, making the Pike the first theatre in history to be brought down over an implied prophylactic.

It was, however, also the first theatre in Ireland to be threatened with State censorship, which had, at that point, limited its absurd degree of scrutiny to films and literature, art forms that might reach the public in ludicrously edited versions or not at all.

The first Dublin Theatre Festival, which made the Irish stage international in both its traffic and its reception, may have opened up the stage as a new battle ground for the policing of culture. As Spiked, a history of the affair co-authored by Carolyn Swift and Gerard Whelan, argues, the de Valera government, then showing signs of loosening its censorship policies, may have sought to appease the church by making an example of a tiny theatre, then drawing unwanted international attention.

VERBATIM THEATRE IS rarely free of agenda in its editing and assembly - few would doubt, for instance, that Clarke does not share the fresh indignation his piece provokes in the audiences - but reported speech within the crucible of a time can never fully sketch the context of its cultural politics.

For this we must be grateful to Interactions: 50 Years of The Dublin Theatre Festival, the Irish Theatrical Diaspora conference presented last week in association with the Irish Theatre Institute and the festival, which outlined the festival's history and continuing development through several involved contributions from international scholars, panel discussions and keynote speeches. In one of the latter, Fintan O'Toole gave a brief history of a political/cultural schism as old as the festival, summed up by the paradoxical idea that An Tostal expected economic change could occur without cultural change - that Ireland could be at once more global and yet no less isolated. It is possible to look at The Case of the Rose Tattoo as the first victim of those irreconcilable ambitions.

But if such well-argued theories gave Dublin Theatre Festival audiences and experts the reassurance that the fitful progress of performance trends and social history might have underlying reasons, The Case of the Rose Tattoo is still haunting for its disquieting lack of explanations. The case, famously, was thrown out of court, Justice Cathal O'Flynn summing up the paucity of the State's evidence with scathing lucidity, while stressing the gravity of the charges and the damage they could inflict on a reputation. (The legal battle cost Simpson and Swift their theatre, while the personal toll cost them their marriage.)

No piece of verbatim theatre, however involving, and no critique, however stimulating, can provide the affair with a satisfying ending. Simpson and Swift both died without an official apology and any piece of verbatim theatre is silenced with the loss of their voices. The demand for the release of all State files on The Rose Tattoo and the contemporary documents of the Irish Censorship Board, which may provide some answers, has surged and dipped over the years, without effect. The undertaking to commemorate this episode without sentimentality - one in which a company, its founders and its supporters stood firm in the belief that theatre could actually make a difference - may have similar benefits, if those demands grow again, from a trickle to a torrent, and bring the case to a close.