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In June 2015, a national newspaper in Britain started a campaign to have a play banned. This surprised me for two reasons. One: clearly no one had told the Daily Mirror about the Theatre Act 1968, which abolished the state’s censorship of the stage and did away with the quaintly repressive (if that’s not an oxymoron) notion of the Lord Chamberlain’s red pen. Two: the play in question was mine.
I wrote An Audience With Jimmy Savile to show how the late entertainer managed to get away with a lifetime of sexual offending. But despite the play’s very public service intentions, the Mirror started a petition to stop it. And so, for a moment, I found myself in some exalted, unwarranted company: Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw had plays banned (Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession, respectively). Inevitably, however, the Mirror’s cack-handed attempt at censorship failed and the play went ahead.
The episode was instructive, however. Because while it’s true that “we” – that is, the British state – don’t ban plays any more, a powerful and unhealthy censorious reflex still exists and there are clear signs that the urge to stifle and to repress has been growing stronger over the last few years. That repression takes many forms: a social media backlash here, a not-very-subtle government threat there – but it’s real, it’s unhealthy and it’s profoundly worrying.
We are not, of course, in the same league as China – where a play bemoaning their treatment of Uyghur Muslims, for example, would never be officially sanctioned – but as playwright David Hare told me in an email exchange for this article, censorship in the West is real. It just isn’t called that anymore.
“Is there censorship in the sense that there is censorship in Iran, Russia or China? Of course not. Nobody’s physical survival is threatened,” he said.
But he does seem to say that the BBC has, in effect, become a censorious government’s useful idiot. (My phrase, not his.)
“The BBC has a current policy of deliberately not alienating the government,” he said. “They have chosen the path of ingratiation rather than asserting their independence. The result is, effectively, a range of subjects [which is] hopelessly narrowed. Hence the ubiquity of cop shows. Even medical dramas are forbidden if they stray into questions of ministerial health policy.”
Some might accuse Hare of pique, given that a TV adaptation of his most recent play, Beat the Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes, was turned down by the BBC. He says it was rejected because of the subject matter: Covid-19. (Hare became gravely ill with the virus and the play depicts him on his sickbed, despairing of the government’s response to the pandemic as they “stutter and stumble” on the airwaves.)
Indeed, when Hare went public with his attack on the corporation for turning him down, it refused to comment and the inference was that this was an editorial judgment and not a political one. But, says Hare, they would say that wouldn’t they?
“Censorship in the West,” he said, occurs “in the impossible grey area between editorial judgment and active prohibition.”
He’s right. The most egregious recent example of censorship-in-all-but-name occurred in 2015 when the National Youth Theatre (NYT) cancelled a production of the play Homegrown, about the radicalisation of young Muslims, two weeks before it was due to open. The executive who made the decision cited “editorial judgment” as a factor.
But, thanks to Freedom of Information requests from Index on Censorship, a fuller explanation emerged soon afterwards. An email from the NYT executive responsible for cancelling the production contained the following line: “At the end of the day we are simply ‘pulling a show’ … at a point that still saves us a lot of emotional, financial and critical fallout.”
In other words: “Yes, we might be censoring an important piece of work featuring the two most underrepresented groups on stage – Muslims and young people – because we are worried about defending ourselves from a backlash which hasn’t happened yet, but we don’t really fancy defending free speech and trying to ride out the storm because it’s too much hassle. So, let’s just cancel it and put it down to editorial judgment. Oh yeah – and safeguarding. Even though putting on work like this should be our raison d’etre.”
The director of the piece, Nadia Latif, was understandably shellshocked. A few weeks after the cancellation she said the creative team were “genuinely still reeling. The gesture of someone silencing you is a really profound one. You give your heart and soul to something, and someone comes and shuts it down. It’s like they’re saying my thoughts and feelings are no longer valid.”
And to refer the audience to my earlier point, it’s happening more and more. Albeit behind the scenes, and sometimes in ways you don’t get to hear about. There are two reasons for this: the pandemic and the nature of the current government.
The pandemic first. Although Hare’s Covid-19 polemic made it to the stage, that was the exception not the rule. I can’t find any other examples of plays critical of the current government being either staged or commissioned.
That would seem to be directly related to the fact that, during lockdown, every theatre in the country was desperate for financial assistance from the Treasury. So regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, few gave the go-ahead to works which bit, or even nibbled, the only hand that could feed them.
This isn’t speculation. When the producers of my play The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson – an unashamed takedown of the prime minister – tried to book it into theatres for a national tour post-pandemic, more than one theatre said, in effect: “We are worried we will lose our Covid grants if we put on a play like that.”
Which brings us on to the current Conservative government and its attempt to take a long march through our cultural, creative and editorial institutions.
When the Tories couldn’t get the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre installed as the new boss of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, they simply scrapped the selection process and ordered that it start again, putting Dacre’s name forward once more – even though, first time round, the selection panel described him as “not appointable”. Dacre has now voluntarily withdrawn and gone back to the Mail.
Someone who was appointable and acceptable, however – to the government, that is – was Nadine Dorries, the new secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. Putting Dorries in charge at DCMS was a bit like getting Herod to run the local nursery. Within days of taking over she reportedly started issuing threats against our premier creative organisation – the BBC – which, in her view, was guilty of not sufficiently toeing the line.
After the BBC radio presenter Nick Robinson hectored Johnson in an interview – “Stop talking, prime minister” – it’s said that Dorries told her advisers that Robinson had “cost the BBC a lot of money”.
A bit like the take on Aids policy from the satricial show Brass Eye – is it Good Aids or Bad Aids? – there is Good Censorship and Bad Censorship. The decision to ban Homegrown falls into the latter category.
But the act of self-editing – in effect, self-censorship – has more going for it. As Hare puts it: “There is all sorts of subject matter I wouldn’t tackle – but entirely because I’m not good enough. I have always refused anything which represents life in Nazi concentration camps, since I don’t trust myself to do it well enough to do justice to what happened. If I don’t think I can do justice to the real suffering of real people, then I avoid, [although] I take my hat off to great writers who are able to expand subject matter at a level where it vindicates the idea of writing about absolutely everything. More power to them.”
But it’s complicated, of course. The worry is that more and more writers, terrified of a vicious social media backlash, are self-editing to an extent that is unhealthy. There are few, for example, who would now dare to pen a play that took a critical, coolly objective look at both sides of the argument over transgender rights – even though tackling difficult subjects and representing “problematic” points of view is, arguably, one of theatre’s prime functions. What could be more relevant, and on point, than a play like that?
One playwright who did sail into these waters was Jo Clifford. Her play, The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, casts Jesus as a trans woman. During its 2018 run at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, an online petition demanding the play be banned garnered a healthy – or rather unhealthy – 24,674 signatures. Soon after that she spoke of how artists and writers were “on the front line of a culture war that will only deepen and strengthen as the ecological and financial crisis worsens and the right feel more fearfully that they are losing their grip on power”.
So, at a time when writers and playwrights need to be bolder, the signs are that they’re becoming more and more cowed; hence Sebastian Faulks’s bizarre announcement that he will no longer physically describe female characters in his novels. Fortunately, most of his peers seem to disagree with him. A recent open letter signed by more than 150 eminent writers, artists and thinkers including JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem warned of “a fear spreading through arts and media”.
“We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement,” it said.
Then again, not everyone agreed with the letter. Author Kaitlyn Greenidge said she was asked to sign it but refused, saying: “I do not subscribe to [its] concerns and do not believe this threat is real. Or at least I do not believe that being asked to consider the history of anti-blackness and white terrorism when writing a piece, after centuries of suppression of any other view in academia, is the equivalent of loss of institutional authority.”
Like I said, it’s complicated.
Promotional material for An Audience With Jimmy Savile. Photo: Boom Ents
The big question for writers, then, is this – if, like me, you believe that anything goes on stage, provided it’s not proscribed by law, how far should you go? Where do the (self-imposed) limits of free expression lie?
Those limits are different for each writer, of course. I would draw the line at, for example, depicting sexual assault on stage. My Jimmy Savile play showed the effects of it, clearly, on the main character – a young woman who’d been abused by him at Stoke Mandeville Hospital – but left the rest to the audience’s imagination. Sometimes it’s more powerful that way.
I would, however, defend the right of other playwrights to go further and include vivid scenes of sexual assault, provided it was for the “right” reasons. There would need to be a coherent dramatic justification for it and the creative team would be advised to have plenty of flak jackets ready. Anyone who tests the boundaries in this way will inevitably face accusations of prurience, unjustified provocation or worse.
In 1980, when Howard Brenton showed a scene of homosexual rape in The Romans in Britain, the production found itself being prosecuted for gross indecency by Mary Whitehouse as part of her attempt to “clean up” Britain. (The prosecution failed when a key witness admitted that, from the back of stalls, what he thought was a penis might have been an actor’s thumb.)
A similar court case today would be unlikely. But then again there is always the Court of Public Opinion, powered by the rotten fuel of social media, which is arguably more scary and intimidating than the real thing.
I wouldn’t draw the line at giving free expression on stage to anti-Semitism, either. Sometimes the best way to destroy an argument is to bring it into the light. With one crucial proviso, which I will come to in a moment.
As a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust I am fascinated by the subject. I would love to see a play which explained where anti-Semitism came from. Or whether the definitions of it are justified. Are there internal contradictions there? (We fought the war to preserve our freedoms, but isn’t using the label “anti-Semitic” a destruction of one of our most cherished freedoms? As in, the freedom of speech?)
Any play which seeks to answer these questions would need characters espousing anti-Semitism – the more articulately the better, in my view – if they are to work properly.
My proviso would be that the anti-Semitism would need to be both contextualised and rigorously challenged. This could be done within the play – two characters arguing – or in the form of a post-show debate.
I would, for example, even have defended the right of writer Jim Allen and director Ken Loach to stage Perdition, their controversial 1987 play for the Royal Court, despite its disgusting anti-Semitic tropes.
The play accused Jews of “collaborating” with the Nazis during the Holocaust (is there a more loaded, insulting, inappropriate word in this context than “collaborated”?) and was based on the story of Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to let more than 1,600 Jews flee Hungary for the safety of Switzerland.
Kastner, it is argued, should have done more to warn more Jews (not just the 1,600 that he rescued) of what was happening. Hence Allen’s line: “To save your hides, you [a Jew] practically led them to the gas chambers.” Disgusting, misjudged and morally wrong.
In the resulting furore, the Royal Court cancelled the play. But the decision to ban it, paradoxically, only increased support for it, and the poison it contained. I would have let it go ahead but tried to persuade Allen to make editorial changes. And if that didn’t work (and I doubt it would have done, although some controversial lines were excised during rehearsals) then I would have staged a debate, forming part of the show, which allowed the Jewish community to explain why the play was so offensive and misjudged. Education beats defenestration, every time.
The stage would be the perfect place to explore the arguments on both sides, but in particular to highlight the muddy thinking of the anti-Israel lobby, as personified by Sally Rooney, who recently decided to punish the Jews by forbidding a Hebrew translation of her latest novel. (Although making them read it might have been a more effective punishment.)
British theatre is not in a good place today. Where are the revolutionaries? The new, angry young men and women, the new John Osbornes? We don’t need to Look Back In Anger: it’s all in front of us, now.
Would a film like 2009’s Four Lions, a deeply moral but, to some, hugely offensive Jihadi satire, get made today? I very much doubt it.
We – all of us: writers, commissioners and directors – need to be braver.
A fatwa was issued against all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses. Photo: Adam Butler/PA Archive/PA Images
Norwegian freedom of speech foundation Fritt Ord has called for a state commission to investigate police handling of the attempted murder of a publisher three decades ago.
In 1993 William Nygaard – a former head of NRK and long-time director of the Aschehoug publishing house – was shot outside of his home in the Oslo suburb of Slemdal. Nygaard was left for dead on the street after being hit three times from behind as he opened his car door.
The call to look at the case again comes after one of the prime suspects in the case was tracked down by a team of journalists working for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
Although nobody claimed responsibility for the attack at the time, the shooting was widely believed to be linked to Nygaard’s support for Salman Rushdie and Aschehoug’s publication in Norwegian of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. At the time Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini for heresy. Aschehoug is Norway’s second largest publisher and has a track record of publishing controversial titles.
Fritt Ord director Knut Olav Åmås has suggested that an independent investigation into the handling of the case is warranted due to the longstanding failure of the Oslo police to make progress despite ample evidence. Åmås has singled out what he sees as strange police behaviour and a failure to follow up on key leads.
“[The handling of the case] should be investigated by an independent commission due to the considerable and surprising number of strange things that have happened, not least in the Oslo Metropolitan Police ever since the murder attempt took place in 1993,” Åmås told Index on Censorship. Åmås has specifically been critical of the Oslo’ police’s failure to focus on the fatwa in the crucial period following the shooting, and the decision to let local police investigate a case of national and international significance.
Witnesses to the shooting used photofits to produce an image of the attacker at the time, but until recently nobody was ever publicly identified or charged for the crime. Last month however the name of one of the suspects was revealed by the NRK team after he was tracked down in Beirut. Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi, who was resident in Norway when the attack happened, has been accused, though he denies all claims. As part of the accusations, he is alleged to have been assisted by a still-unnamed employee of the Iranian embassy in Oslo.
“It is a very important case, both as an integrated part of the whole Rushdie affair, and also as an important precursor to the [Danish] cartoon controversy, where Islamic regimes´ pressure on freedom of expression became a dramatic global event.” says Åmås, who is a former culture editor at Norway’s leading broadsheet Aftenposten.
Moussawi lived in Norway until 1996 and regularly attended events at the Iranian embassy. Despite having a son born in Oslo his family were never granted citizenship and he was eventually deported from the country and returned to Lebanon, inadvertently complicating the investigation into the Nygaard shooting.
In 2008 the Norwegian Prosecuting Authority determined that the case should be reopened and responsibility was shifted from the Oslo Metropolitan Police to Kripos, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service .
Åmås says that the latest revelations mean it may finally be possible to bring Nygaard’s attackers to justice.
“It shows that Norwegian police has evidence that they should act upon, by issuing a so-called Red notice through Interpol for example – and also working with Lebanese authorities to make it possible to bring him [Moussawi] to Norway for interrogation. The same should happen to the Iranian who has been charged.” Åmås believes.
If the unnamed Iranian embassy staff member is convicted and a link is proven between Iran’s embassy and the shooting, it would also retrospectively establish the crime as an act of state-sponsored terrorism rather than attempted murder.
The Iranian Embassy in Oslo has denied the claims. “This type of allegation…is completely without basis, and we strongly reject this allegation,” it told NRK.
Moussawi also gave an extensive interview to NRK in Beirut when his identity was revealed, claiming to have been unaware of his status as one of the prime suspects. He also repeatedly denied any involvement with Hezbollah, the Lebanese religious and political movement with close ties to Iran that endorsed the fatwa against Rushdie.
“I have never been active in Hezbollah, either politically, religiously or socially,” Moussawi told NRK. “There was no political activity in the embassy. We drank tea, ate and read from the Koran,” he said.
The Winter issue of Index magazine highlights the battles fought by theatre of resistance across the world and how they’ve been enduring different forms of censorship.
Writer Jonathan Maitland dives deeply into the history of theatre censorship in the United Kingdom and explains why British playwrights need to lose their fear and be bolder. Kaya Genç and Meltem Arikan provide a good overview of the situation in Turkey in the most recent years, where theatres have been closed down in Istanbul.
Natasha Tripney analyses the impacts of an exaggerated nationalism and how it restrains plays from moving forward.
The theatre of resistance, by Martin Bright: Index has a long history of promoting the work of dissident playwrights.
The Index: Free expression around the world today: the inspiring voices, the people who have been imprisoned and the trends, legislation and technology which are causing concern.
Women journalists caught in middle of a nightmare, by Zahra Nader: Many Afghan journalists –women in particular – have fled the Taliban or are in hiding from the brutal regime.
Hope in the darkness, by Jemimah Steinfeld: Nathan Law, one of the leaders of Hong Kong’s protest movement, is convinced that the repression will not last forever. We publish an extract from his new book.
Speaking up for the Uyghurs, by Flo Marks: Exeter university students have been successfully challenging the institution’s China policy, but much more needs to be done.
Omission is the same as permission, by Andy Lee Roth and Liam O’Connell: Malaysia’s introduction of emergency powers to deal with “fake news” was broadly ignored by the Western media – and that only emboldened the government.
I can run, but can I hide?, by Clare Rewcastle Brown: Journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown is a wanted woman in Malaysia – and the long reach of Interpol means there are now few places where she can consider herself safe.
Dream of saving sacred land dies in the dust, by Scarlett Evans: Australia’s mining industry is at odds with the traditional beliefs of the Aboriginal population and it is taking its toll on the country’s indigenous heritage.
Bylines, deadlines and the firing line, by Rachael Jolley: It’s not just pens and notebooks that journalists need in the USA, it’s sometimes gas masks and protective vests, too.
Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: “I’ve done my own research.”
Maltese double cross, by Manuel Delia: Four years on from Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, lessons have not been learned and justice for the investigative journalist’s family remains elusive.
“Apple poisoned me physically, mentally and spiritually”, by Martin Bright: A former Apple employee, who was fired by the tech giant after blowing the whistle on toxic waste under her office, says her fight will go on.[
]Keeping the flame alive as theatre goes dark, by Natasha Tripney: Theatre across the world is fighting new waves of repression, intolerance and nationalism, as well as financial cuts, at a time when a raging pandemic has threatened its existence.
Testament to the power of theatre as rebellion, by Kate Maltby: The Belarus Free Theatre, whose 16 members have now gone into exile to escape the Lukashenka regime, are preparing to perform at the Barbican in London.
My dramatic tribute to Samuel Beckett and catastrophe, by Reza Shirmarz: More than three decades after Index published the celebrated playwright’s work dedicated to the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, the censored Iranian writer Reza Shirmarz has responded with his own play, Muzzled.
Why the Taliban wanted my mother dead, by Hamed Amiri: The author of The Boy with Two Hearts on why and how the family fled Afghanistan.
The first steps- Across Europe with Little Amal, by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson: Good Chance Theatre on their symbolic take on the long journey of refugees from Syria to the UK.
Fighting Turkey’s culture war, by Kaya Genç: Theatres have been shuttered in Istanbul but the fightback by directors and playwrights continues.
I wrote a play then lost my home, my husband and my trust, by Meltem Arikan: The exiled Turkish playwright’s Mi Minör was blamed for the Gezi Park protests.
Where silence is the greatest fear, by Issa Sikiti da Silva: How Kenyan theatre has suffered under a succession of corrupt rulers, hot on the heels of colonial repression.
Censorship is still in the script, by Jonathan Maitland: British theatre has lost its backbone and needs to be more courageous.
God waits in the wings…ominously, by Guilherme Osinski and Mark Seacombe: A presidential decree that art must be ‘sacred’ has cast a free-speech shadow over Brazilian theatre.
Elephant that should be in Nobel Room, by John Sweeney: The winners of this year’s Peace Prize deserve their accolade, but there is another who should have taken the award.
We academics must fight the mob – now, by Arif Ahmed: The appalling hounding of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University is a serious threat to freedom of speech on campus.
So who is judging Youtube?, by Keith Kahn-Harris: Accused by the video behemoth of spreading misinformation, the author conducted an experiment in an effort to understand how the social media platform policies its content.
Why is the world applauding the man who assaulted me?, by Caitlin May McNamara: It is time for governments and businesses to decide where their priorities lie when it comes to the Middle East.
Silence is not golden, by Ruth Smeeth: As we enter a new year, Index will continue to act as a voice for those unable to use their own.
The road of no return, by Flo Marks and Aziz Isa Elkun: The Uyghur activist and poet, exiled in the UK, yearns for his family and friends imprisoned in Chinese concentration camps.
Bearing witness through poetry, by Emma Sandvik Ling: Poets are often on the frontlines of protest.
The people’s melody, by Mark Frary: For the first time, English readers can now experience the joys of Ethiopian poetry written in Amharic thanks to the work of Alemu Tebeje and Chris Beckett.
No corruption please, we’re British, by Oliver Bullough: The UK has developed a parallel vocabulary to avoid labelling anyone with the c-word … until now.
As Richard Ratcliffe enters day 16 of a hunger strike to protest against UK government inaction in the case of the continuing detention of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran, he says it is not the lack of food that is his biggest worry.
“It is the cold,” he says from his makeshift tent village outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall, just a short walk from the Houses of Parliament. Last Friday – Guy Fawkes Night – the mercury dipped to below freezing as a candlelit vigil was held to raise awareness of this wife’s plight, who has been detained in Iran for more than five years.
Nazanin, who was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the time of her arrest, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 for “plotting to topple the Iranian regime”. As the end of her sentence approached, Nazanin was told she faced new charges of “propaganda activities against the government”. In April 2021, she was sentenced to a further year in prison. I spoke to Richard at the time in our podcast.
It is clear that Nazanin is clearly a pawn in a game of one-upmanship between the British and Iranian governments. There is no guarantee that she will be released even after serving the new sentence.
This is why Ratcliffe is carrying out his protest – to make the British government recognise that its strategy towards Iran has failed.
With his quilted jacket and woolly hat and mittens, Ratcliffe looks like many of the nearby rough sleepers. Yet few of those on nearby Whitehall are surrounded by pebbles painted by young children and carved pumpkins or have their tents festooned with fairy lights. Still fewer have a pile of Amazon deliveries from well-wishers.
Camped out in the heart of British Government, Ratcliffe has been visited by a steady stream of MPs, including the Conservative MP for Ipswich Tom Hunt today.
This in itself is quite unusual.
“I have certainly been visited by more opposition MPS than those in the government,” says Ratcliffe. “I have had a lot of visits from the Labour front bench. Of those in the Government that did visit, very few wanted their picture taken.”
He has not been short of other well-known visitors wishing him well, including the author Kathy Lette, Victoria Coren and TV presenter Claudia Winkelman.
Ratcliffe says that despite promises from former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, little seems to be happening in official channels to secure the release of his wife.
“There have been no negotiations of substance for a while,” he says.
As the light faded and the temperature dropped again tonight, Ratcliffe’s hunger strike continued. Many experts say that the human body can endure around 25 days without eating before permanent damage occurs.
Ratcliffe plans to continue while he can.
“One of the things I have heard from other hunger strikers is that you eventually start closing in on yourself. That hasn’t happened so far,” he says. “You have to listen to your body though.”
Richard’s family and friends are naturally worried for his well-being and many are taking it in turns to keep his spirits up. As I speak to him, his mum – resplendent in a multi-coloured coat that belies the seriousness of the situation – pops over with a hot water bottle to keep the cold at bay.
Despite the cold and the growing concern of the effects of not eating, Ratcliffe will remain outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for now and certainly until later this week when Iran’s vice president Dr Ali Salajegheh leaves the UK after attending COP26 in Glasgow.
When the Government’s focus turns away again from the global ecofest, it needs to think about how it deals with Iran.
He says, “I don’t think the Foreign Office understands Iran properly. The Government also needs to look long and hard at its hostage policy and its ineffectiveness.”
Ratcliffe is clear on one thing that would help secure Nazanin’s release – the British Government could pay the £450 million that Ratcliffe and many others believe say it owes to the Iranian government. The money was paid to the UK in the 1970s by the then Shah of Iran to buy Chieftain tanks and armoured vehicles. When the Shah was deposed, Britain sold the vehicles instead to Iraq but kept the money.
Sign the petition to Free Nazanin here and, if you are in the UK, write to your MP.