Last month, Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre cancelled its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Previews had already begun; the press opening, already delayed by injuries, was imminent.
The show’s director, Stef O’Driscoll, went public. Her vision for Shakespeare’s wonderland was set in Manchester’s drum’n’bass scene, and the Royal Exchange had pulled the plug because she’d included a rap, performed by “a trans politically conscious mechanical”, containing the phrases “free Palestine” and “trans rights”. Palestine was the sticking point. The theatre had censored her, O’Driscoll alleged, in what was “not an isolated incident but reflects a growing trend of censorship and fear-driven decision-making in the arts”. Theatre’s online communities went into overdrive. Equity denounced “a growing culture of censorship created by funders and pressure groups”. Yet some staff told me a different story. Everyone agrees the show was running far behind schedule. One cast member described tech rehearsals as “a clusterfuck”. With days to go, O’Driscoll introduced not just a rap, but audience participation games and a call-and-response exercise that would have roused the audience to take part in the “free Palestine” chant.
Manchester is not only home to one of the UK’s largest Jewish communities, but to British relatives of Jewish Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October. The show’s run included its first anniversary – the greatest loss of Jewish life since 1945. The theatre, faced by the prospect of Jewish audience members finding themselves invited to start chanting “free Palestine”, asked O’Driscoll to cut the rap. She refused.
Nonetheless, the theatre community sympathised with O’Driscoll, whose story of censorship resonated strongly. Many had stories of their own about Palestinian voices reportedly being censored. At the Chickenshed theatre, for example, a short play named Conversations with My Father was mysteriously taken off the bill at a February new writing festival, with press representatives instructing critics to remove mentions of it from their early coverage. The Barbican was accused of censorship after pulling a talk titled “The Shoah after Gaza” – the arts centre asserts the event had been announced in error.
It is now one year since conflict returned to Gaza and southern Israel. The British theatre scene, with its remarkable power to make everything about ourselves, has tied itself in knots about who it should and shouldn’t platform. As deputy chair of Index on Censorship and outgoing chair of the Critics’ Circle, I’ve heard more complaints about arts censorship in Britain than ever before.
Many of those stories, however, have been of Jewish voices censored. Not Israeli voices, Jewish voices. Theatres postponing pre-scheduled plays about the Holocaust, on the grounds they might invite a security threat. A standup show about kosher food withdrawn because the timing was not right, “globally”. The team behind Fiddler on the Roof, which ran at Regent’s Park this summer, have admitted considering whether to pull the show after 7 October. On these stories, there has been no outrage from theatre’s activists.
This week, Patrick Marber will open his new play, a collaboration with the writer Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, at the little-known Marylebone theatre, an odd venue for a leading theatre-maker. The major theatre to which he’d offered it told him the board were concerned it could spark protests. Marber told me he’d rewritten the play to reflect Jewish life after 7 October. “Isn’t the theatre a place where we talk about stuff that is difficult and complicated and nuanced?”, he recalls asking. Yes, came the answer, “but the board don’t want it debated in this particular venue at this particular time”.
Whatever happened in Manchester, O’Driscoll’s experience has something in common with Marber. In major theatres, risk-management decisions are made by boards and executives, not artists. Post-Covid theatre coffers are empty, so appetite for risk is at an all-time low.
Until August, Manchester Royal Exchange was being run by an interim “executive director”, after artistic directors Roy Alexander Weise and Bryony Shanahan departed in 2023 in the aftermath of another show’s chaotic cancellation – the entirely uncontentious Red Velvet. The theatre had received Covid loans and emergency grants of £2,854,444 in October 2020, much of which needed paying back.
Plays on Jewish or Arab subjects are also victims of a new code in theatreland: characters from a minority must be played by members of that minority. Two of London’s best recent shows, Fiddler on the Roof and the Orange Tree’s Here in America, resorted to flying in stars from Israel and America respectively. Conversely, British actors of Arab descent are now involved in fierce debates as to which Arab groups should give voice to Palestinian characters. Is this progress, or just a way to add more obstacles to telling these stories?
Here in America examines playwright Arthur Miller’s friendship with Elia Kazan, the film director ostracised by Hollywood after he denounced colleagues as communists. The play’s power comes from its thoughtful depiction of a right and a left who both blacklist each other – back in the 1950s. But that sense of rival groups braced to denounce each other also lies behind much of theatreland’s current fear of tackling anything to do with Israel, Palestine, Muslims or Jews.
Equity, which supported O’Driscoll against “censorship”, condemned a production of Richard III because its lead was not visibly disabled. She has won support from the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement – which has on several occasions protested against allowing Israeli artists to perform at the Edinburgh theatre festivals.
Meanwhile, pro-Israeli groups in the UK are taking inspiration from America, where an organised lobby has long organised to ban work like The Death of Klinghoffer or My Name Is Rachel Corrie. All these groups should reflect on how absolute their commitment to freedom of expression really is.
It’s not all gloom. The Royal Court theatre, which has previously failed tests on this issue, has triumphed with Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant, which adroitly explores the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism through the character of Roald Dahl. It’s a marriage of craft and courage – but took six years in development. Culture war flashpoints kick off in theatres that are already underfunded, overextended and at breaking point. To have these conversations well, theatre doesn’t just need “free speech”, it needs funding, care, and the security to take risks.
Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
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