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LONDON -Nudity and crudity have charged onto the London stage, rushing in where royal censors previously made producers fearful to tread.

The theater, unfettered since the elimination of the official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, has gone the way of all flesh. But there's lots more to English theater than shocks the eye and burns the ears.

At the Royal Court Theater, Billy the Kid snarls obscenities at Jean Harlow.

At the Duke of York's a homosexual has a baby.

At the Comedy, four young men stage a scene so nude that one actor's mother flew all the way from Canada to tell her son to put his pants on.

At the Ambiance, lunchtime audiences see an entire play performed in bed. And at the Shaftesbury, men and women leap naked from beneath a blanket.

Censorship was abolished from the London stage last September, and the curtain already has risen on at least half a dozen plays that would have been sliced up by the Lord Chamberlain's blue pencil.

Does the new freedom mean a pornographic revolution in London?

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"I don't think so," says one agent. "There is no great rush to see a dirty play-none of them are doing very good business.”

'Clearly no purveyor of filth is making a fortune," says Sunday Times critic Alan Brien. Some of the post-censorship plays have already closed for lack of

By David Lancashire.

trade despite sensational publicity.

"Fortune and Men's Eyes" the one with the male nude scene-lasted six weeks.

"I have lost 5,000 pounds ($12,000) ($12,000) on the six-week run," says impresario Larry Barnes. "I'm going back to staging family entertain-

ment."

Most of the new plays, such as "Hair" or "The

Beard," are American. Most have been dismissed Most have been dismissed by the critics as boring, amateurish, sad, pessimistic or grotesque.

"It is difficult to imagine anyone emerging muttering 'hot stuff' or 'let's go to my ‘hot stuff' or 'let's go to my place and have an orgy,' Brien writes.

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Commentators agree that once the novelty has worn off, the so-called "dirty plays" will have to offer something more if they are something more if they are to survive.

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But with or without sex,. London's 40-odd theaters in London's 40-odd theaters in the West End are enjoying a the West End are enjoying a

boom. With so much happening on so many stages, it's easy to forget that the pseudo-pornographic plays even exist.

Shakespeare still packs them in at the Old Vic and the Aldwych.

"Hadrian VII," an unlike-

ly hit about a fictitious pope, has been standingroom-only since it opened "Fiddler on the Roof" are last winter. Musicals like

thriving, and Agatha Christie's "Mousetra p” just started its 17th year at the Ambassador.

London is the center of the English-speaking theater at the moment," according to publicist Theo Cowan and most others in the busi-

ness.

Cowan estimates that about five plays are lined up and waiting to get into every theater in the West End.

One reason for the healthy state of drama here is that a play can be produced for as little as $14,400. An ambitious musical might run to $352,000 to stage.