The US "Love-Rock Musical" was infamous for its nude scene, but other aspects of the play were just as radical. In 1968, its director, Tom O'Horgan, told the BBC how it had fallen foul of an outdated UK censorship law that was on the verge of being abolished.

Fifty-seven years ago this week, London's theatregoers were treated to the sight of a stage full of naked actors. That would have been impossible just a day earlier. For more than 200 years, no new play could be put on in Britain unless it was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, a senior officer of the Royal Household. And nudity was just one thing that this all-powerful censor didn't allow. But the law was changed, and the Lord Chamberlain's dominion finally came to an end on 26 September 1968. The following night, Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

"We couldn't have done the play the way we're doing it prior to this time without drastic modifications," the director of the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical", Tom O'Horgan, told the BBC. One of those modifications would have been to cut the famous – or infamous – scene in which the whole cast appears on stage in no costumes except a beaded necklace or two. But O'Horgan didn't believe that the nude scene was "the major crux of the problem". In fact, the Lord Chamberlain's office had refused to license Hair in July 1968 for several reasons. "Much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play," said O'Horgan, "which are also perhaps shocking to people because we deal with the things the way they are, and we tell it the way it is."

Hair was the brainchild of two out-of-work actors, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who were inspired by the groups of young hippies they had seen hanging out in New York. Their plan was to write a musical that would put such people in the spotlight, with all their freedom, energy and anti-establishment attitudes towards sex, drugs, their parents, the government and the war in Vietnam. Galt MacDermot, a decidedly un-hippy jazz enthusiast, was hired to add music to Rado and Ragni's lyrics, and the show opened off Broadway, at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, in October 1967. The following April, it moved to Broadway's Biltmore Theatre, where it played to packed houses every night, but only after it had been overhauled, with new songs, new actors in most of the roles, and a new director (O'Horgan).

This version also introduced the scene for which Hair would become known. "A nude scene was inserted at the end of Act One that caused lots of talk – the kind that sells tickets," noted Colette Dowling in the September 1968 issue of Playbill magazine. "It also made one of the play's most forceful moral statements."

The moral statement was that youthful bodies like the ones displayed on stage every night were being clothed in uniforms and torn apart by bombs and bullets in the Vietnam War. There was nothing sexual about the scene, and the actors weren't even required to disrobe completely if they didn't want to – although the producers did stump up a $1.50-per-night bonus to anyone who was willing.

By the time Hair came to London, O'Horgan felt that the nude scene had been "greatly over-emphasised" compared to the play's other examples of radical politics. The brief........

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