JS:TO tour postponed
According to The Times today, pressure from “radical Christians” has forced the national tour of Jerry Springer: The Opera to be postponed, at least until after Christmas. Nearly a third of the venues withdrew on the wake of the Maggie’s Centres blackmail by Christian Voice. Clearly not all theatre directors reacted to the threats like Gwenda Hughes of the New Vic.
Council-run theatres were particularly susceptible, but the production company is being strongly supported by The Ambassador Theatre Group and The Theatre Royal in Plymouth (the starting venue).
Jon Thoday, head of the production company Avalon, said he was determined to continue:
It has become a crusade now. Perhaps that is the wrong word: it is more of a holy war.
Talking of which, Magnus Linklater makes a relevant comment in the same newspaper on Michael Howard trying to make an election issue out of abortion:
In Britain it was once possible to dismiss these groups as part of an irrelevant fringe. With the decline of mainstream religion, however, this country too is becoming fertile territory for the fundamentalists.They will seize on Mr Howard’s pronouncement, and use the backing of the Catholic Church to give extra weight to their own crude campaigning. One can only hope that Britain is too phlegmatic for the kind of tactics they favour. But Mr Howard and Cardinal Murphy-O’ Connor are doing their best to reverse the tradition.
Magnus Linklater’s article is odd.
He doesnt explain why being phlegmatic is such a virtue. And if one asked a first-year group of students to go through the piece differentiating rhetoric from actual argument it would be instructive.