I presented myself at St James's Palace and was given sherry. He left that to a group of advisers who were mostly retired naval officers. The Lord Chamberlain (the runner of the Queen's Household) did not normally meddle directly with plays. The play was critical of the American intervention in Vietnam at a time before press or public questioned it.A few days before US was due to begin previews, I was asked if I would go and have an out-of-office-hours drink with the Lord Chamberlain This was an unusual invitation.

In the declining years of the censor's office, I experienced something of this power myself.In 1966, Peter Brook and Denis Cannan devised a Royal Shakespeare production for me at the Aldwych Theatre which was called US. His presence created a climate of caution which was quite as dangerous as his direct censorship. The play was not popular in Westminster.The Lord Chamberlain had another function: he was in fact an instrument of the reigning Establishment. As the Lord Chamberlain had earlier licensed a play called Votes for Women, which referred to abortion, there is good reason to believe that Waste was found undesirable because it lifted the lid on the inescapable cynicism of politicians The abortion issue was a good excuse. The Lord Chamberlain's official objection to the play cited "Extremely outspoken reference to sexual relations" and "a criminal operation".

It was, of course, immediately banned.Barker took years to recover from the ban. The play also featured a refusal to resign, a sexual scandal and a tragic abortion. It demonstrated that there was little place for ideals in politics: what mattered was the possible - and more than that, the deal that made the possible, possible. How is the wretched capitalist to live?" This is not an extract from the Today programme, but a speech from Granville-Barker's Waste.The first version of the play was finished in 1907. It's hardly safe when you are in office to hold on to a share - much less a directorship.

It is an ideal play for an Election Year, particularly apt in the politics of our bewildering times."We poor politicians must work double-shifts for our bread-and-butter while we are in opposition. It was not allowed to grow up until 1968. During all those years, how many authors, when they looked at that blank sheet of paper, thought that whatever the strength of their ideas, there was no point in writing their new play because it would assuredly never get past the censor?Waste (to me, the most perceptive play about politicians since Shakespeare) has had little chance to emerge in its full wit and brilliance. His controls did not apply to the press, to publishing, films or broadcasting It was only the theatre that suffered. Waste, and its author, Harley Granville-Barker, were also victims of the Lord Chamberlain. Ibsen was cautioned, Shaw was banned, and, as late as 1957, Tennessee Williams was consigned to a Private Club for mentioning (in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) that homosexuality might just possibly exist.