Plague Over England

Late on 20th October, 1953, Sir John Gielgud, then at the zenith of his theatrical career, was arrested in a Chelsea public lavatory. He pleaded guilty the next day to the charge of persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes. In the prim, homophobic Britain of the 1950s, Gielgud's offence attracted vicious criticism from public and press alike and threatened to terminate his career. A few weeks later, however, when Gielgud opened in London in a new play, something extraordinary happened. Nicholas de Jongh's Plague Over England is not just a dramatized account of a scandal. It relates Gielgud's emergency to the country's political mood and depicts a nation in the grip of a gay witch-hunt.