Public Record Office: The day an Iron Curtain almost fell on Shakespeare's saucy scenes

A racy Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was the cause of a diplomatic crisis when it toured behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, the Public Record Office reveals today.

The heat generated between the characters of Bottom and Titania alarmed the socialist commissars of Romania with its "Western sexual permissiveness and moral decadence" to such an extent that they demanded changes to the production during its tour of Eastern Europe.

The British ambassador in Bucharest alerted London to the play's capacity to cause unease after he sat in embarrassed silence between two Communist Party dignitaries during a performance at the city's Opera House.

Derick Ashe sent dispatches to Whitehall detailing the reaction of the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Vice-President of the Council of State for Culture and Socialist Education, warning of the potential for further embarrassment as the production headed on to Sofia, Zagreb and Warsaw. "Watching those adroit fairies prepare Bottom for his night of love with Titania, I began to get the uneasy feeling that things were not going well as I observed their consternation and embarrassment at the erotic miming before us. This impression was confirmed by their almost monosyllabic comments at my reception during the interval," he said.

The next day the British embassy's cultural attaché and the manager of the theatre company were called to a meeting that lasted two and a half hours, at which Romanian officials demanded changes to the "Phallic Bottom episode".

No changes were made and Eric Vines, a civil servant in the cultural exchange department of the Foreign Office, asked ambassadors in all the countries where the play toured to report back on its reception. The Bulgarian embassy said there had been requests to cut the Bottom and Titania scene.

Correspondence released today reveals the extent of the Foreign Office's anxiety over a dedication in the play's programme by Peter Brook, the RSC's director at the time, to the Za Branou Theatre, a banned Czechoslovakian theatre company. The dedication bemoaned the closure of the company as a "loss to freedom".

The production was told not to take copies of the programme on the tour. But exchanges of letters between the Foreign Office, the RSC and the British Council, also released by the Public Record Office today, show that copies were quietly distributed in theatres.