Euan McColm: Capitulation to activists undermines artists' ability to tell their truth

LISTENING to a song called “4:48 Psychosis” by Tindersticks, last week, I got thinking about the late playwright, Sarah Kane. The track is named after and incorporates elements of the text of her final play and anyone familiar with Kane’s work will be unsurprised to learn the music is dark and unsettling.

For a few short years before her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, Kane was a great theatrical provocateur. Her work was brutal, speckled with moments of horrific violence, and seemingly devoid of hope.

Kane's notoriety began in 1995 with the premiere of her debut play, “Blasted”, a disturbing story set during a civil war. Its explicit scenes of rape, murder, and cannibalism repulsed many theatregoers while reviewers were either disdainful or angry. So far as most critics were concerned, Kane was a hack, out to shock the audience.

Amid this backlash against her, defenders of Kane’s work, and her right to produce it, emerged. Big names in the world of theatre, including Kanes’s fellow playwrights Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, rallied around Kane, proclaiming her a major talent.

This seemed right to me, at the time. It still does.

It was important those who would have seen Kane’s work cancelled heard a loud and defiant “F**k you”.

Throughout history, theatre has often produced the first substantial creative reactions to the times. It is crucial that writers and directors feel free to challenge and to transgress and that any attempt to silence or censor is resisted.

A couple of weeks ago, one of Sarah Kane’s contemporaries found himself in need of allies. None, I’m afraid, were forthcoming.

David Greig, the playwright and artistic director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, found himself at the heart of a career-threatening crisis. His crime? Greig had “liked” two posts on Twitter.

One of the tweets read “Lads and lasses in the trenches fighting the gender madness - what is the best (very recent) example you can think of that shows how we have won this crazy war?” while the other referred to two recent incidents involving the police. It read: “If you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women's rights rally, you will just be cautioned.”

An artist by the name of Rosie Aspinall Priest could not allow Greig’s intolerable behaviour go unpunished. She alleged that he was “openly liking transphobic tweets”, adding that there were “Really awful things on display here that do not align with the values inherent within Scotland’s theatre sector”.

What followed was a depressing yet predictable capitulation by Greig.

He closed down his Twitter account and emailed staff at the Lyceum, apologising for his “careless and harmful” actions. Greig went on to announce that he’d be speaking to the theatre’s human resources department to set up training in dealing with such sensitive matters.

I understand why Greig reacted as he did. Over recent years, we’ve seen a number of people - usually women - frozen out of the arts world for failing to loudly proclaim and endorse the contemporary mantra that “trans women are women”.

The writer Gillian Philip lost her job as a writer of teen fiction after announcing her support for the gender critical views of fellow novelist JK Rowling. The poet Jenny Lindsay was hounded by fellow writers and lost countless bookings and other employment opportunities as a result. She had dared to publicly challenge a call from a trans rights activist for assaults on women at a Pride march.

While assorted mediocre writers and arts administrators made it their miserable mission to destroy Lindsay’s career, most of her contemporaries preferred not to speak up. All those truth-to-power poets silenced by people whose tactics are eating away at artistic freedom.

Scotland could do much more to support the arts. Government ministers are quick to talk proudly of Scotland’s cultural contribution to the world but less enthusiastic when it comes to funding.

It is troubling, indeed, to think that those meagre funds currently available are being distributed by gatekeepers who prefer their creative sorts to adhere strictly to their current moral code (and do bear in mind that the code may change at any time without warning or explanation).

Rosie Aspinall Priest is no friend of the arts. She's a modern-day puritan, no wiser than those who would have shut down Sarah Kane’s plays in the late ‘90s.

The silence from performers about recent attempts to cancel appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe by people who hold gender critical views doesn’t do much to inspire hope that those in the creative sector are close to realising that capitulation to activists undermines their ability to tell their truth.

David Greig should not have felt the need to apologise. Rather, he should have been confident that his contemporaries would come to his defence. Greig’s freedom to like what he likes is our freedom to do the same. If we think it right that he be punished for thinking what some self-appointed moral judge declares the wrong thing then we must be ready and willing to accept the harshest sanctions when the witch-finders, as they surely will, get round to us.

In these dark times for creative freedom, a glimmer of light emerged in an interview with Fringe organisers. Chief executive Shona McCarthy last week told The Scotsman “ideas, however difficult, however challenging and however much they may not appeal to you particularly, should still be allowed to be expressed.”

Every serious artist has a vested interest in supporting this simple idea.

The next time activists come for a director or. poet or a novelist, it would be reassuring if their contemporaries - just as Harold Pinter did with Sarah Kane - came to their defence.