War & Peace Quote by Timothy West

West is puncturing a comforting myth: that edgy, “alternative” theatre is some timeless London birthright. His point is procedural, almost bureaucratic, and that’s what gives it bite. Before the postwar boom, there wasn’t a neat cultural lane called the fringe. There were only two imperfect options: hide a play inside the legal fiction of a private club, or stage it publicly and submit it to the same scrutiny, paperwork, and taste-policing as the mainstream.

The phrase “assessed along with everything else” does a lot of work. It suggests a culture that didn’t just censor but homogenized, treating theatre less as a live argument with society and more as a product to be graded. West’s actor’s eye is on the practical consequences: experimentation wasn’t a brand, it was a risk-management strategy. If you wanted to put on something politically sharp, sexually frank, formally weird, you didn’t market it as “fringe.” You found a loophole, or you sanded off the edges.

The context matters: the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship powers (not abolished until 1968), rationed resources, and a social order eager for stability after trauma. West is also making a quiet generational claim. The later “fringe” scene often gets romanticized as pure artistic rebellion; he’s reminding us it grew from constraints, not vibes. The subtext is a warning to contemporary culture: when gatekeeping becomes the default setting, dissent doesn’t disappear, it just relocates into semi-illicit spaces and private rooms.