[9][10] Everett Wilson speculates that the law may have arisen due to "the fear of theatrical producers that without legal protection both the money and the audience would flow away from the "legitimate theatres" to the lowest common denominator of entertainment in those days, the music halls.
Open only to their members, these houses evaded the censorship law by turning their performances from a public enterprise into a private one.
[3] In the 20th century, the term legitimate theatre "became vernacular within [the] turn-of-the-[20th]-century amusement market" and "confirmed the fact that conventional stage plays no longer monopolized the definition of legitimate theatrical entertainment," while serving "as a strategy for profiting under these new conditions" across the English-speaking world.
[1] The separation between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" finally formally ended in the aftermath of the scandal Edward Bond's Saved created in 1965–66.
The evasion was challenged by the magistrate's court in February 1966 and declared a violation of the Theatres Act 1843 on 1 April 1966.