When censors ruled the stage

CENSORS are always "behind the scenes" in film or the theatre stage, but what happens when their actions and words (explaining those actions) get put into a script and played out on stage?

It becomes entertaining and also insightful theatre.

Portuguese theatre company Mundo Perfeito gave us the theatrical version of the world of censorship through their play, Three Fingers Below the Knee, last week.

The subject was censorship laws and proceedings in Portugal, from 1926 to 1970, when it was under the longest right-wing dictatorship in Europe. When the country had a change of government, the theatre archives were made available to the public, and that's when Mundo Perfeito director Tiago Rodrigues decided to go through the censorship material.

He trawled through pages of correspondence detailing why plays were censored and collated the lines which interested him. From there, he and the actors further selected the lines which they knew would work on stage. Then they crafted a structure to hold them together - so that the play we saw on stage had Acts and Scenes, styled within a mash-up of classic theatre pieces like Shakespeare and Greek works.

But all the text were completely made up of explanations given by censors when they cut out plays and suggested acting changes - when costumes were too revealing (skirts have to be three fingers below the knee) or actions too intimate, when suspected subversive metaphors were used, and even silences. What was most amazing is how censors became almost directorial in their changes, unleashing their inner directorial ambitions.

Actors Isabel Abreu and Goncalo Waddington - alternately campy and dramatic - together with their costume changes, kept the audience engaged throughout.

The most interesting premise, and poetic too, of Three Fingers Below the Knee was that it used the censors' words for the text; so that instead of shaping a play, they fleshed out the production - through their words and actions of cancellation and censorship. Director Rodrigues says no changes were made to the text at all, because then wouldn't he be censoring the censors? Besides, it wasn't meant to be an "academic" piece but there were sufficient "signposts" providing a context to the history of Portuguese censorship.

With the Singapore experience and a little knowledge of the struggles of theatre-makers against the censorship committee, it was gratifying to look into another country's experience of it - even if they harked back to another time in history.

And was this play censored by Singapore censors, asked an audience member who was clearly surprised, and sounded disappointed, that it wasn't at all. But then, why would one country's censors censure another country's censored material, pointed out Haresh Sharma, co-artistic director of the M1 Fringe Festival, who chaired the post-show discussion.

Rodrigues, in turn, affirmed that historical material need not be incomprehensibly weighty, nor need one be too heavy-handed with the political comment - for the audience to grasp and better appreciate the nuances.