When Hair arrived in London in 1968, it wasn’t just the nudity that shocked audiences—it was the play’s blunt honesty about politics, war, sex, and society. Known as the “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” the show collided head-on with Britain’s centuries-old system of stage censorship, which demanded every new play be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. For more than 200 years, that office had dictated what theatre could or couldn’t show, banning everything from profanity to intimate scenes.
That grip ended on 26 September 1968, when the law was finally repealed. The very next night, Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre, with its cast stepping onto the stage fully nude in one of the production’s most talked-about scenes. Director Tom O’Horgan told the BBC at the time that such a performance would have been unthinkable just days earlier. He admitted the nude sequence drew headlines, but he stressed that it wasn’t the real reason the play had been rejected by censors months before.
For O’Horgan, the essence of Hair was its raw, unfiltered look at the world. “Much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play,” he explained, noting that the show’s themes—its anti-war spirit, embrace of counterculture, and direct treatment of taboo issues—were what truly unsettled traditional gatekeepers. “We deal with things as they are,” he said, “and we tell it the way it is.”
While Hair’s experimental style may not have troubled the Lord Chamberlain too deeply, its lyrics almost certainly would have. As critic Miller noted, the show was filled with “four-letter words, explicit sexual references, drug use, and ritualistic themes” that would have sent the censor’s red pen into overdrive. Alongside its famous, feel-good anthems like Aquarius and Let the Sunshine In, the musical offered songs that deliberately pushed boundaries. Sodomy turned a gospel tune into a catalogue of sexual acts, while Hashish was little more than a hypnotic chant celebrating a wide range of narcotics. Other numbers, such as Black Boys and White Boys, playfully exalted interracial attraction in ways designed to provoke. Taken together, these taboo-breaking lyrics would have been unimaginable under the Lord Chamberlain’s old licensing regime.
