If I were Ronald Butt, the good Lord Longford or Mrs Mary Whitehouse, I would be out there picketing the National Theatre Company for staging the first uncut version in English of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening.For it is surely the worst thing that has happened, from their point of view, since the abolition of censorship in the British theatre.

The English Stage Society gave it two Sunday club performances in 1963 in Tom Osborn's translation, and after two years of negotiations the Lord Chamberlain granted it a licence for public performance on condition that ‘there was no kissing, embracing or caressing’ between two schoolboys in the vineyard scene, nor use of the words ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’, and that an alternative was found to a scene of group masturbation in a boys’ reformatory—one wonders that he allowed the girl's death at the hands of an abortionist (but, after all, it was tactfully off-stage and she did die). At that time, in 1965, the National Theatre turned it down—a spokesman is said to have said, ‘all right for some poky experimental theatre in Sloane Square’ (not mentioned in its otherwise totally emancipated programme notes); but now they have made great amends to a great play, and in a new translation by Edward Bond.

By dragging up the ghost of the Lord Chamberlain, I have contrived to mention every superficial aspect of the play which attracts both the censorious and the half-liberated salacious. Infact, the group masturbation scene is perfectly fitting in this work of art when ‘taken as a whole’, as the law on obscenity now sensibly says. But even without these things, it is a play which would upset the three good people I’ve mentioned.