I don’t think about it much now. At the time, it was like being plucked up in the steel jaws of some puritanical JCB. It is a strange sensation to realise that you are an object of hatred and vilification. We moved soon afterwards and made our telephone number ex-directory. No more abusive phone calls, illiterate, obscene, anonymous letters, threats to get me, get my family, burn my house down, dog turds through the letter box. (Yes, really.) … No matter that unemployment was climbing to three and a half million. This was real news. The National Theatre puts on a dirty play.

As the dust settled, Brenton wrote in the New Statesman 2 April 1982 of his anger and contempt:

The only court a moral campaigner, or indeed a playwright, needs is somewhere to be heard – a theatre – the only jury, an audience there of its own free will. The only judgment worth having, for moralist or storyteller, is to be believed. All Mary Whitehouse had to do was to challenge me, the true ‘procurer’ of The Romans in Britain, to a public debate. She never communicated with me, she never saw the play. We could have gone on television or onto the Olivier stage. But instead she tried to cut out my tongue, by trying to outlaw my play, and trying to break my director’s hands on a legal rack of her own design.

There is, of course, no reference to the play, to the writer, or to the director in Mrs Whitehouse’s autobiography.

The Play’s Afterlife

Confusion remained after the trial as to the interpretation of the ruling. As the Guardian for 19 March said: ‘Mr Justice Staughton endows the 1956 Act with a fearsome potency which parliament did not intend then, or in 1968, or today … The Staughton ruling therefore stands as a beacon for potential private prosecutions … It is a depressing and threatening moment for British drama and all connected with it’.

Lack of clarity in law inhibited subsequent proposed productions. Yet since the judgment was not binding on the lower courts, production was entirely feasible. Fear of prosecution is, however, potent. As is ignorance. In 1983, the English and Drama department of University College, Swansea, attempted to mount the play in the Dylan Thomas Theatre. It was banned both by the College and the City Council, in spite of the trial’s defence solicitor, the Anglican Chaplain, and Brenton himself travelling to Swansea to give a press conference. An angry Brenton wrote to the Guardian (1 October 1983): ‘The loose-bowelled, tin-pot cultural Stalins running the Dylan Thomas Theatre should beware. I day-dream that Thomas would have understood The Romans in Britain. But I am certain of what his ghost thinks of the people who have banned it under his name: he curses them…’.

An amateur production finally took place in November 1989, at the Amateur Dramatic Club, University of Cambridge. Mrs Whitehouse called the local police, who attended a performance with a police barrister. No action was taken. The ADC’s manager commented: