Can actors at the National Theatre quote Christopher Hitchens’ destruction of Shirley Williams for her failure to defend freedom of
speech against suicide murderers on Question Time, while all the time contorting themselves in athletic dance moves? My somewhat surprising answer is ‘yes they can’.
The DV8 dance company’s Can We Talk About This? is almost a compendium of stories I have
covered. The opening section moves from Salman Rushie to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the Danish cartoon ‘crisis’. It maps the opening section of my You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, where I look at the power of religion to provoke
censorship and self-censorship. Inevitably, I focus on radical Islam, which in Europe causes more writers to bite their tongues and throw down their pens than any other clerical force. Lloyd
Newson, the director, knows it too, and feels the same outrage that the hypocritical pieties of multiculturalism allow ‘liberals’ to go along with anti-liberal restrictions on free
speech and women’s rights.
Indeed he knows it so well that I sat there thinking, ‘bloody hell, so this is what my book would look like if it were — er — turned into modern dance.’
Newson then goes off into stories that anyone who relies on the mainstream media would never know happened: the struggle of liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims against Sharia in the magnificent One Law
for All campaign; Ann Cryer’s battle against forced marriage, which her fellow Labour MPs, so nit-pickingly PC in all other respects, found a 1001 reasons to avoid joining.
I thought the press night was a triumph, and so did the audience at the National. It applauded the actor/dancers to the rafters. But what of those who believe that multiculturalism has not degenerated into a corrupt movement that allows reactionary men to impose their will on their communities? I wrote in the Observer a few weeks ago about how one should never judge a work of art on political grounds unless it is agitprop. Is that what Newson’s produced? The test will be if a standard, modern liberal could go to the National and find, amid all the brilliance of the acting, ideas that challenge them without repelling them.
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