TERF Edinburgh Fringe review - 'JK Rowling meets a brattish Harry Potter cast to discuss her tweets'

Laura Kay Bailey (R) as 'Jo' in TERF | Photo by Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images

TERF

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20)

★★☆☆☆

It’s billed as the most controversial performance on the Fringe, but the most dramatic moment is before it even starts. As you enter the auditorium, it feels like everyone’s trying to second guess where everyone else sits on the spectrum of the women’s rights versus transgender rights debate that we’re about to see reanimated, like Frankenstein’s monster, live on stage. Having been forced to change venues, writer Joshua Kaplan’s depiction of a plummy voiced JK Rowling meeting her three brattish ‘children’ (members of the Harry Potter cast), to discuss her well-documented tweets, has some interesting points to make about posturing on Twitter (now X) while real life happens elsewhere, but it struggles to expand a Shoreditch House chat into a one hour twenty-minute play. As they’re served food by an anonymous figure with their mouth taped shut, it’s not a subtle set-up – less interested in exploring the real-life experiences of those involved than creating its own ‘intervention’. 

There are poised performances from the determined cast, in particular Laura Kay Bailey who brings odd but enjoyable Audrey Hepburn-style pizazz to the role of Rowling. The show’s flier might give the impression that its protagonist will be portrayed as a witch, but the only superhuman powers she demonstrates here are writing best-selling novels. The at times astute dialogue touches on how male-driven abuse targets people on both sides of the conversation. When a recording of protestors shouting ‘TERF C***’ (the play’s original title) starts playing, two men in the auditorium cackle loudly. Meanwhile, on stage, JK and the Harry Potter crew finish what is actually a fairly civilised discussion compared to the ones going on elsewhere.

Bookended by relaxing lounge music, perhaps designed to calm everyone’s nerves, there are so many people laden down with cameras and notebooks, squeezed together under the chandelier of Assembly’s opulent Ballroom, that it would be easy to think that the target audience for the play is The Media. Maybe it is. Or maybe the kinds of commentary that I’m writing (and you’re reading) now are creating an alternative kind of ‘show’, blowing up this performance like a balloon to be far bigger than it would have ever otherwise naturally become. Perhaps next year, Summerhall will offer us a transfer. One of the companies behind the show already has an appropriate name: Theatre of the Existential Void.  As a man from the New York Times tries to interview me, before establishing that I’m not “a normal person”, and another from the venue’s cleaning company attempts to stop me from using the loo because I haven’t bought a ticket (“I’m the press, dahling: I don’t have to”), it feels like the world of the play is merging with reality and we’re just fanning the flames to keep the fire alight. Please can someone intervene with a bucket of water? 

until 25 August

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