Bugs' interview with Louis Negin originally ran in the April 2013 edition of Fugues magazine.
There’s
nothing quite like making a grand entrance. Just ask Montreal theatre legend
Louis Negin, the first actor to ever appear nude on a legitimate British stage,
in John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes in London’s West End back in 1967.
But if
London audiences gasped when Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe appeared nude
in the West End revival of Equus in 2007, imagine the reaction to Negin 40
years earlier!
“In London at that time if you went to see a play with nudity in it, you had to join a (theatre) club which couldn’t be closed down (by the police),” Negin explains. “When Lord Chamberlain dissolved that law, Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes – with its explicit scenes of gay rape in prison – was a huge success with audiences in Canada and the West End.”
Ironically, it wasn’t Negin being buck naked on stage that made him the toast of the theatre world, but rather an incident on opening night that made sensational newspaper headlines worldwide.
“In London at that time if you went to see a play with nudity in it, you had to join a (theatre) club which couldn’t be closed down (by the police),” Negin explains. “When Lord Chamberlain dissolved that law, Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes – with its explicit scenes of gay rape in prison – was a huge success with audiences in Canada and the West End.”
Ironically, it wasn’t Negin being buck naked on stage that made him the toast of the theatre world, but rather an incident on opening night that made sensational newspaper headlines worldwide.