To the casual eye, George Devine made for an unlikely-seeming revolutionary. In Howard Coster’s 1934 photograph, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, he looks like nothing so much as a master at Greyfriars School, his spectacles horn-rimmed, his hair neatly oiled. Only the flamboyant angle of the hand that holds his cigarette suggests the reality: this was the actor who, as the director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, would produce John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger.

According to Irving Wardle, the nearest thing he has to a biographer, Devine was “personally inconspicuous”. If creating an “open space” for “rebel artists” took courage – it’s difficult to grasp, now, how incendiary Osborne’s words seemed at the time – it also involved a certain quietness. The work would speak for itself.

Last Friday, the Royal Court’s current director, Vicky Featherstone, showed a little of the same quiet courage. Twenty-four hours after cancelling a production of Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too in the wake of the news that its original co-director, Max Stafford-Clark, had stepped down following allegations of sexual harassment, she issued a further statement in which she admitted to having been shocked by the claims of censorship levelled at her, and had therefore changed her mind. The Court will stage the play, with its themes of “grooming” and “male power” (its words, not mine).

It is, I think, a measure of the current atmosphere that so uncontroversial a move – the production has been touring since September, and the play, with its wild, working-class teenage heroines, has been loved and admired ever since Stafford-Clark discovered its 19-year-old author in the early 1980s – seemed weirdly momentous: significant enough to make the main news bulletins. When I heard about it, I poured myself another drink.

Of course, it should have been obvious to everyone involved right from the beginning that the Royal Court, like all subsidised theatres, is required to be the polar opposite of a so-called “safe space” in artistic terms; plays, all you babies out there, don’t groom people – although I do take the point of the friend who joked to me that she’d once been harassed by some late-period Tom Stoppard. But then, it’s hardly as if the Court is alone when it comes to being lily-livered. This is just one in a long line of recent instances of mimsy self-censorship in the arts and, in the months and years ahead, I predict many more, the fear and trembling among institutions growing exponentially as further cases of harassment and abuse are revealed, and some of those we know about already perhaps pass through the courts.

Anxiety in this matter should not, moreover, be a new thing. It certainly isn’t for me. Although it gives me no pleasure to say so, I saw all this coming. Last April, when Harvey Weinstein was still protected by his ghastly network and the liverish glow of his formerly high-wattage power, I wrote a long piece about the increasingly nervous attitudes of galleries to “difficult” work in which I speculated that, among other artists, Balthus, some of whose subjects are pubescent girls, would probably soon find himself in trouble. And so it came to pass. Earlier this month, a woman called Mia Merrill launched an online petition calling on the Metropolitan Museum of Art to remove his 1938 painting, Thérèse Dreaming. More than 11,500 people signed it, on the grounds that they find it “disturbing” (Thérèse sits in such a way that her underwear can be seen). Again, it tells you something that while the petition didn’t surprise me, the fact that the Met held its nerve did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A petition failed to force the Metropolitan Museum of Art to remove Balthus’s Therese Dreaming. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

People talk of a “reckoning”. At last, they say, women need no longer be silent about what they’ve suffered at the hands of men; our idea of what constitutes sexual assault has changed forever. I have no problem with this. I wrote my own #MeToo column five years ago, when people were busy wondering how Jimmy Savile had got away with his crimes for so long. (Not that anyone noticed: after it was published, I did not receive a single supportive message from the sisterhood). But we need to be careful. This is a dangerous moment as well as an important one. You don’t have to look very hard to see that we’re beginning to conflate sexual mistakes of all kinds with abuse, that beneath the surface of this debate conservative forces are at work, as well as reforming, liberal ones.

In the New Republic recently, a writer described a happy, consensual relationship she had had with her university tutor. Buried in the middle of her account was a line about extramarital affairs more generally that terrified me. She spoke of the way “transgressors” who leave their partners are “forgiven” if they go on to remarry and have children: “a toxic concept”, she said. What? Are we going to outlaw love affairs now? Isn’t forgiveness supposed to be a good thing? (I write as someone who has had to do quite a lot of forgiving down the years.)

The effect of this muddle on relationships is a subject for another time, another column. But its effect on the arts is going to be – this is my bet – grim. The mob can be whipped up in as long as it takes to hit a keyboard; institutions are risk averse, worrying about funding and audience development with freedom of expression seen as mere tinsel atop the tree. Pressure comes from the police, who can’t afford to protect those who refuse their “advice” when they deem something to be inflammatory, and from both left (take a look at the behaviour of some Momentum types) and right (the Daily Mail). Add the febrile mood surrounding Weinstein and co to this and you see in which direction we’re heading.

The line between art and biography has long been fraught; I’ve written about it before with reference to Philip Larkin and Eric Gill. But let me ask the question once again: who chooses the artists with morals so impeccable they will take the place of those we’re going to throw under our hurtling bus?

There are endless reasons to resist censorship, most so manifest I can hardly be bothered to articulate them (start with the idea that art is supposed to make us think, and work your way from there). But when it comes to old art, rather than new, there’s rarely any good reason to expunge it from the record. Read a book or watch a play, and see how you/we have changed. Prescience isn’t a straightforward thing; rather magically, art sometimes updates itself. In the 21st century, Osborne’s anti-establishment hero, Jimmy Porter, appears to us as a conservative figure, a man whose diatribes against the status quo don’t quite hide the fact that part of him clings to it. An update might have him supporting Brexit, and that in itself would be a reason to see it – though, alas, I have to tell you that he’ll never not be a sexist pig.