Safe battles, safe applause

I recently attended the West End production of Retrograde by Ryan Calais Cameron, an admirably taut play about Sidney Poitier’s refusal to sign a loyalty oath and denounce Paul Robeson. The piece builds to a thunderous climax — the audience erupts with applause and cheers as Poitier finally stands firm against a racist network executive. Yet this reaction gave me pause. Isn’t it too easy, in 2025, to applaud the heroism of the past? Would the same audience leap to its feet for someone standing against a contemporary orthodoxy? It’s the easiest thing in the world to be progressive about race in London today.

Retrograde’s reception suggests something troubling about our stages: we seem willing to dramatise only those moral battles whose outcomes are long since settled. Theatregoers are asked to weep or rage against villains no one defends, and to admire courage that no longer costs. The civil rights movement was advanced by pioneers who stood alone. Would audiences today really have joined them in 1955 — or are they indulging in retrospective self-congratulation?

Perhaps it’s easier to applaud past bravery than confront today’s dilemmas. There have been no mainstream plays tackling the clash between trans rights and women’s rights — a live issue that has reached the Supreme Court and fuelled endless division. While theatres have staged solo works by trans performers, these pieces, by their nature, sidestep the real conflict: the collision of rights playing out in our culture. Why the reticence? Perhaps because any serious treatment would require — whatever the writer’s view — giving voice to perspectives they find uncomfortable. Shaw, though a socialist and pacifist, gave his best arguments to characters he surely found repugnant: Mrs Warren’s defence of pimping, Undershaft’s sermon on arms dealing, Joan’s Inquisitor compellingly justifying her death. Is it beyond a contemporary playwright to give real rhetorical force to a composite figure of Stock, Bindel, or Rowling — even if they disagree with her? Shaw’s plays didn’t offer easy victories. Vinnie Warren resigns herself to a dreary job; Joan burns; even Major Barbara loses the argument. The drama lay in the collision — not the win.

Why has there never been a serious play about the grooming gang scandal? The recent Channel 4 documentary Groomed: A National Scandal laid bare the appalling social, political, and institutional failures that enabled the mass abuse of working-class girls. To its credit, the BBC dramatised the Rotherham episode in Four Girls — but theatre, which so often prides itself on standing up for the exploited and voiceless, has produced nothing. Is it squeamishness? Would actors baulk at portraying abusers? Hardly — they frequently play killers and predators. Is it, rather, that audiences would feel profoundly uncomfortable watching middle-aged men of Pakistani origin committing prolonged, coordinated abuse? Yet discomfort is no excuse for silence. We’ve had a whole genre built around staging public evidence — trial and inquiry transcripts, interview testimony — in plays about Stephen Lawrence, Hillsborough, and Grenfell. If the long-promised inquiry into grooming gangs takes place, will our theatres stage it? Why has no writer yet drawn on the extensive testimony already available to give voice to the survivors? 

I could spend pages outlining the suspiciously convenient gaps in theatre’s treatment of difficult but defining issues. Few are more glaring than the absence of serious drama addressing Islamist extremism, or the deep social conservatism found in some British Muslim communities. While the rise of the far right has inspired dozens of plays — Destiny, Oi for England, A Day at the Racists, Foam — we have seen almost nothing comparable addressing Islamic radicalization. A couple of verbatim pieces — Talking to Terrorists and Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State — have been produced. The only notable dramatic intervention remains Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali’s 1989 Iranian Nights, a response to the Satanic Verses affair, written when they — unlike today’s literary institutions — had the clarity to oppose the threat against Rushdie’s life.

The contrast with earlier decades is striking. At the height of the IRA bombing campaign, Brenton staged republican rhetoric in The Romans in Britain, and mocked Britain’s political and aristocratic dead in A Short Sharp Shock. The resulting outrage was part of the point. Why are we now so unwilling to be disturbed? Why can’t we be distressed by hearing an extremist’s justifications, meet characters who have been bereaved or maimed in atrocities, or witness the virulent antisemitism that goes hand-in-glove with Islamist ideology? 

On antisemitism, theatre has made its contribution — though more often by prompting accusations than by dramatizing. The Royal Court has weathered multiple storms — Perdition, which historians like Martin Gilbert and David Cesarani argued distorted the historical record of Zionist-Nazi interactions; Seven Jewish Children, which was accused of playing into ancient blood libel; and Rare Earth Mettle, in which a grotesque capitalist caricature was named Hershel Fink — a name so stereotypical that the theatre had to hastily alter it. In the wake of the backlash, the Royal Court staged a feeble verbatim piece entitled Jews. In Their Own Words. More recently, Giant, a compelling and serious reckoning with Roald Dahl’s antisemitism, made a genuine contribution. 

Theatre is dominated by a progressive consensus that fears offending certain groups

But theatre has yet to confront the antisemitism documented within parts of Britain’s Muslim communities — never mind broader tensions between liberal democratic values and conservative or sectarian Islamic beliefs. A 2016 report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 44 per cent of British Muslims endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories; Meanwhile, a separate ICM poll for Channel 4 found that 52 per cent believed homosexuality should be illegal, and 39 per cent thought wives must always obey their husbands. These are not fringe views. They are statistically significant, and they sit in deep conflict with the progressive ideals that theatres claim to champion. You would think this tension — between liberalism and culturally embedded illiberalism — would be fertile ground for drama. But no such drama exists. Perhaps, when the waters have calmed, in a millennium or so, our theatres will feel safe enough to confront it.

So why the caution? In part, it’s political: theatre is dominated by a progressive consensus that fears offending certain groups, or thinks that it is outright immoral to offend them. Minority sensitivities weigh heavily. When Behzti offended the Sikh community, it was withdrawn under pressure. Any controversial portrayal of Islam risks even stronger reaction. And yet, high-profile UK productions of Terence McNally’s Corpus Christi — with its gay Jesus — have gone ahead despite controversy. Voltaire’s Mahomet, by contrast, is unthinkable. 

What of the audience? Those who cheer Retrograde’s righteous denouement might fall silent in the face of something more disruptive — a so-called TERF triumphant, the testimony of a rape gang survivor, or a forthright justification of the bombing of a pop concert, delivered by a dramatised equivalent of an Abedi brother. But so what? Theatre has always been a place for disturbance. We lionize Ubu Roi and The Playboy of the Western World for inciting riots. Theatres once embraced provocation. Now they tactically flinch.

We need to recover that spirit of confrontation

The fabulously contrary — and now largely sidelined — playwright Howard Barker, in his seminal Arguments for a Theatre, diagnosed the modern stage as a site of consensus: a “humanist theatre” in which “we all really agree” and “we celebrate our unity.” This is a long way from the democratic tradition of Greek tragedy, in which audiences were invited to wrestle with the most difficult questions of their time. Aeschylus challenged the instinct for revenge in The Oresteia and gave Persia’s defeated enemies dignity and tragic grandeur in The Persians. Catharsis, in such plays, came only after immense struggle and discomfort.

We need to recover that spirit of confrontation. It takes a brave venue, a brave writer, and a brave audience to stage arguments that defy consensus — ones that challenge the cherished beliefs of a bien-pensant public. But if theatre is to mean anything, it must engage with the battles still being fought in 2025 — not just those safely won long ago.