in practice.

Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by
merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor
should witness the performance. The mise-en-scene of a play is as
much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. No censor
could possibly object to such a speech as "Might I speak to you
for a moment, miss"; yet that apparently innocent phrase has
often been made offensively improper on the stage by popular low
comedians, with the effect of changing the whole character and
meaning of the play as understood by the official Examiner. In
one of the plays of the present season, the dialogue was that of
a crude melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct
manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtuous girl. Its
morality was that of the Sunday school. But the principal
actress, between two speeches which contained no reference to her
action, changed her underclothing on the stage? It is true that
in this case the actress was so much better than her part that
she succeeded in turning what was meant as an impropriety into
an inoffensive stroke of realism; yet it is none the less clear
that stage business of this character, on which there can be no
check except the actual presence of a censor in the theatre,
might convert any dialogue, however innocent, into just the sort
of entertainment against which the Censor is supposed to protect
the public.

It was this practical impossibility that prevented the London
County Council from attempting to apply a censorship of the Lord
Chamberlain's pattern to the London music halls. A proposal to
examine all entertainments before permitting their performance