‘Dares to take on one of the most powerful — and controversial — women on the planet”.
– The Hollywood Reporter
In December 2023 I took a call from US screenwriter Joshua Kaplan. His credits were pretty cool. Tokyo Vice was one of the most talked about shows of the season and I was more than a little taken by the fact that he’d worked on one of my guilty pleasures from lockdown ‘Designated Survivor’. What he was pitching though, was a show called TERF CUNT, a piece about JK Rowling and her gender critical beliefs. An hour on Zoom with him, and I was hooked; and had agreed to come on as Creative Producer, and eventually director.
Flash forward 7 months and I’m standing in front of the fountains in Princes Street Gardens crying on the phone to my mum begging her not to look at Facebook. A bunch of cretins who read Breitbart with their fingers had found her and were spamming her with messages saying it was a shame my sister had died and not me.
Before TERF had even taken its first breath on the public stage, it had become a global phenomenon. Blindly loved and hated by critics before it even existed, the subject matter was so divisive that it now feels like our first iteration of the show could never really have been about the art. After over a year though, I stand my ground on this one. JK Rowling is still a cunt and TERF as a show has the makings of a global hit.
Our presentation at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe was reviewed 44 times. It generated over 600 articles and opinion pieces globally and resulted in the creation of over 12 hours of broadcast content; from Fox News and GM Britain, to SKY news and the BBC. In fact, such was TERF’s cultural impact, it’s being archived in the National Library of Scotland. As far as my work with Civil Disobedience goes, it was a huge success, artists are indeed here to disturb the peace, Mr Baldwin.
We had a great script. A great cast, and eventually… a great venue. The critics who loved it, recognised the performances, the writing, the story and the humour. Those who hated it critiqued its failure to take a side. They wanted riots on the streets. They wanted real life drama. They wanted JK Rowling to be pilloried.
It’s fair to say we went too soft on her, and we got distracted by the drama surrounding our presentation. None of us had ever worked under this level of scrutiny before.
‘the most provocative play to hit the Edinburgh Fringe in years’ – The Daily Telegraph
Taking this show from script to stage was challenging every step of the way, not because we lacked support from an arts community who recognised talent and quality work, but because of the fear of taking a moral position in one of the most prescient debates of our time: the right for trans people to live with dignity and free from discrimination.
TERF is controversial because art is, and must be, political. Its subject is JK Rowling and her transition from national hero into one of the most polarizing figures in modern day Britain. TERF is not proselytizing but invites you to come, be challenged, and form your own judgements.
It’s also been fully legalled by bto Solicitors.
As it stands, the show has been the subject of articles in The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Pink News, Brietbart, Fox News, Red State, and Cracked, as well as the Sky News daily round up. All but two of these reports were accurate despite our repeated attempts to offer corrections. Reports suggested that it was misogynistic, that we were struggling to cast, and even that Josh (the writer) was enabling ‘child mutilation.’ Coverage of the show has highlighted the worst aspects of social media and the British press: biased, click-bait driven coverage which draws upon and encourages hatred, discrimination, and bigotry in comment sections and on social media.
We were removed from our initial venue amidst concerns for audience safety. This ironically happened the same day Rowling entered the conversation on X with a lighthearted challenge that India Willoughby be cast as her in the show. It seemed that she found the whole thing amusing. A relaxing of attitudes perhaps, after an accurate Telegraph article was released in which we gave the writer an exclusive first read of the script, which was judged to be ‘impressively even-handed?’
‘an impressively even-handed and wickedly funny caricature of all the leading players’ – The Daily Telegraph
TERF began as an exploration of how digital media and online discourses are rotting our abilities to make ethical, considered, and respectful decisions on how we perceive and treat our fellow humans. Rowling has made herself a public figure at the forefront of the gender ideology critique but she is only the face of this show, which asks each of its attendees to reassess the decisions they’ve made and the way they’ve made them, in the hope that everyone who leaves our play will – after just 90 minutes sitting in the dark – have a newfound respect for the differences between us and a greater openness to navigating these boundaries.
TERF is not about fostering infighting or capitalising upon distress; it asks that we overcome the conditions of such warfare and that we step from the theatre and into the world together – with a greater openness to the shared conditions of our lives. Our play has been subjected to the same censorship and stymied thinking which prevents us from having real, meaningful, and forward-thinking conversations about how to bridge our differences – but we are here, and ready to take to the stage again with a refined script, and a bolder voice that does not shy away from the horror that is JK Rowling.
Art is not window dressing; it is a hammer with which we explore the questions of our time.
We’re currently seeking brave carpenters to help us take this work to the next level.
BCW 