11.09.1997

Brief encounters

Tom Ball reviews 'The censor' by Anthony Neilson (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, West Street, London WC2 to September 27)

The censor (Alastair Galbraith) has a lonely existence in the ‘shit hole’ of the censor board where he has been beavering away examining pornographic films for the last six years. Isolated from the world outside, the censor does not even have access to the power-laden third floor of the director’s suite. His personal life is empty, his wife (Alison Newman) frequently takes lovers, and he suffers from impotence.

All changes when Miss Fontaine (Jan Pearson), who has submitted her film for examination, arrives for a meeting. She wants to discuss the censor’s dismissive attitude: he wants to cut 35 minutes and give it an R18 video certificate, making it available only from sex shops.

Miss Fontaine gets under the censor’s skin, challenging his accepted methods of working, his certitudes about the acceptability of images. Ultimately, she forces him to confront his own demons, to face up to unpalatable truths about his own desires.

While the censor initially seizes only upon the images the work presents, serving back to Miss Fontaine in inimitable censor board style stripped-down, bare descriptions of the sexual acts they show, she counters by pressing him to engage with the subtexts.

Adopting a Reichian stance, Miss Fontaine continually puts up an invitation to sexual activity as the means to a resolution for the conflicts suffered by the censor, in this way challenging all of society’s taboos. He is compromised, but not in the way he at first imagines. Miss Fontaine’s subversion extends beyond the genre within which her film is constructed and grips him, resisting though he may, with erstwhile unseen meanings. For her it is a work of importance to the world; and in the way that it is made to represent all that might ever be censored, it does have that importance for the audience, and thus the wider world.

Professional distance having already been abandoned, the censor is unable to resist Miss Fontaine’s implacable onslaught, using mind and body. He groundlessly asserts that “without censorship there’d be no allegory, no metaphor, no restraint ...” But the tenets of his case against her film are becoming shredded.

Although weakening, the censor resists Miss Fontaine’s invitation, legs splayed, to have sex on his office floor: He cites an “infestation” of undefined nature which prevents him taking up her offer. Is his infestation one of the body, as he asserts, or of the mind, which would be less amenable to medical treatment, but perhaps more so to her tender embraces? Despite all protestations, she divines that he suffers from impotence. She knows him much better than he knows her: he has given away a great deal about himself through her verbal probings. Finally, she discovers his deepest, dread mode of sexual arousal and, pandering to it in the kindest way, brings the two of them to coital embrace. The allegory is of societal fears overcome by kindness, sensuality and sexuality.

Afterwards the censor is left longing for her from afar. His disconnected thoughts of times with her are interspersed in a desultory conversation at home with his wife, presented here in a masterful way as a series of filmic flash-forward scenes interleaved between those with Miss Fontaine and brought together for the denouement.

This is no crude polemic against censorship. Author/director Anthony Neilson and his three players have brought a subtlety to the question whereby the most erotic moment in the piece does not even derive from depiction of coital coupling or discussion of its achievement, but instead is to be found in that moment before the couple’s (unknowing) final kiss.

Miss Fontaine delivers the censor from himself, from his task of censorship, and ultimately from the constraints of a society which separate him from spiritual fulfilment.

Tom Ball