Is it a brave speech for New World?

Published: 06 August 2010

TO follow up to my letter of three weeks ago, reporting the apparent censorship of Gonzalo’s “Utopian” speech in  Act II, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the Old Vic management told me it was because the actor was ill that night. 

When I reported that a friend told me the speech was still missing on another night, the theatre management changed its tune and said it had been cut for “artistic reasons”.

I will offer the price of a ticket for the show to anyone who can give me the best artistic reason for cutting this wonderfully subversive and comic speech.

I can’t help feeling the reason is political, because I understand this production is to tour in America. This may be crude thinking, as Brecht called it, but it’s a crude world.

NICHOLAS JACOBS
Lady Margaret Road, NW5