"Caroline Bird, the play's writer, laughs. There is one on the website and it's quite funny because it sounds like a play that Mary Whitehouse would really hate. The dramatist finds it on her phone. Here it is: This show contains graphic sexual language, homophobia and references to suicide and death. Religious imagery is used in a way some may find offensive.'"
"If the content advisory follows one modern theatrical trend, the play's authorship goes against the increasing convention that subject matter should ideally match the playwright's own experience. Mary Whitehouse wasn't material I would naturally have been drawn to being leftwing and gay, two things of which she didn't approve, admits Bird. Her previous biographical drama for Nottingham Playhouse, Red Ellen (2022), was much closer to her own politics and feminism in its depiction of the pioneering Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson."
Mary Whitehouse campaigned from the 1960s against sex and swearing on television and pursued private prosecutions for blasphemy and gross indecency. A contemporary play starring Maxine Peake portrays her as a Christian cultural vigilante and carries a website content advisory warning of graphic sexual language, homophobia, suicide references and potentially offensive religious imagery. Playwright Caroline Bird, though leftwing and gay, accepted the commission after encouragement from Peake and director Sarah Frankcom and researched Whitehouse by reading her books. Bird encountered statements framing AIDS as vindication and calling for spiritual conversion for gay people, revealing the extremity of Whitehouse's views.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]