The Lord Chamberlain's licence for this play is conditional upon the phrase 'Party of Dynamic Erection' throughout the play being changed to 'Party of Dynamic Insurrection'

The words above appear, exactly as I reproduce them, on the first page of my battered, beer-stained copy of David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and his Struggle against the Eunuchs. It is a French's acting edition dating from 1966, and I possess it because long ago I appeared in the play. Not so long ago, however, that we needed to obey the Lord Chamberlain's instructions. The date was 1969. Censorship of the British stage had ended the previous year. We could mention the Party of Dynamic Erection as often as we wanted and did.

The foregoing paragraph had already been written when a copy of last Friday's Oxford Times was placed on my desk. Reading the letters page, I was naturally struck by the coincidence that theatre censorship should have been mentioned in an amusing contribution from "a mature lady" concerning the sexual mores of the 1950s. I had expressed doubts in my review of Losing Louis at the Playhouse about whether the bedroom frolics depicted would have been quite so adventurous in those days. Valerie Davies wrote that "although the Lord Chancellor sic but it was clear who she meant may have limited what might be performed on stage, nothing either depicted or referred to in Losing Louis was unknown or unpractised in those unenlightened 1950s." It is clear, I think you will agree, that she speaks with authority, so I cannot do other than own that I was wrong.

My purpose in writing today about Little Malcolm is not, as it happens, to provoke thoughts about censorship, although this would not be inappropriate in a week in which the would-be censors are active in Oxford, with demands for the banning of Jerry Springer The Opera at the New Theatre. It is rather to pay tribute, of a sort, to David Halliwell, who died on March 16, aged 69. Until reading his obituaries, I had not been aware of the disappointments in his life not the least of which must have been that Little Malcolm was his only real stage success. Other blows included the failure of the film version, in which its West End star John Hurt reprised the title role, and the abandonment of an earlier film of it that was to have starred the Beatles. Director Karel Reiss explained: "They could not act."

Looking back on my own performance as Malcolm Scrawdyke, I would say no false modesty here! that acting ability of a rare order was demanded, especially in the vast, rambling monologues that punctuate the piece. Some of the language is arcane and unlikely. Until called upon to snarl "tergiversator!" at one of Scrawdyke's hopeless cronies, I had never previously heard the word. Halliwell clearly wrote with a dictionary in one hand.

I took on the role during the early months of my studies in Sheffield on a National Council for the Training of Journalists' 'pre-entry' course a title to which the Lord Chamberlain might well have objected had it been uttered on stage. It was lost on none of us involved that Richmond College, in the soulless suburb of Crookes, had much in common with Huddersfield Tech as described in the play, which deals with the ambitions of the maniac Malcolm to achieve absolute power and revenge himself on the college principal who expelled him. I took some pride then, and still do now, in the fact that I was able to pass myself off as a Yorkshireman before audiences composed almost entirely of Yorkshire people. It helped that I had a flatmate from Harrogate who not only took a bath (to rhyme with Kath) but filled it with water (to rhyme with matter).

Besides my memories and the script, I have another reminder of the production in the charcoal drawing at the centre of this page. This was executed, with remarkable speed, by one of my trainee journalist colleagues, to meet the playwright's demand for an unfinished self-portrait of Scrawdyke to adorn his dingy, one-room studio.

Oh, to be 18 again!