Edinburgh Festival: not so keen on ‘fringe’ views
It may be the biggest arts festival in the world, but the cancelling of Jewish performers is a reminder that the arts have a big problem with anything beyond a narrow, wokeish orthodoxy.
The Edinburgh Festivals kick off this week. The world’s biggest arts festival, which runs for three weeks, takes over Scotland’s capital city and will host the usual mix of comedy, theatre, dance and more. But one thing it seems increasingly less keen to host is anything at odds with the new cultural orthodoxies. This year, the most obvious casualties of this outlook are Jewish performers.
The publicly funded, elite International Festival has been running since the late 1940s. Pretty quickly, a few fringe events started appearing that weren’t part of the official programme. Now, the Fringe is a behemoth, with performers – as ever in recent years – paying through the nose for venues and accommodation in exchange for the privilege of being part of the action. As Andrew Doyle notes in an excellent reflection on how ‘woke’ took over the Fringe for UnHerd:
In truth, the Fringe has for many years been little more than an elaborate trade fair, where overinflated prices benefit corporate sponsors and venues at the expense of punters and acts, and critics and awards bodies rally together to prioritise their regressive identity-obsessed ideology over talent.
So, given the hassle and expense of performing for acts that are not household names, it must be especially galling when your show gets cancelled because your views – or your face – don’t fit.
At Whistlebinkies, a popular live-music venue just off the Royal Mile, Jewish acts have been told they are no longer welcome. Rachel Creeger’s Ultimate Jewish Mother and Jew-O-Rama – a comedy night that features a ‘rolling line-up of Jewish and Jew-ish comedians’ – have been axed, the latter having run at the Fringe for nine years.
The host of Jew-O-Rama, Philip Simon, has also had a show cancelled at another venue, Banshee Labyrinth, who told Chortle: ‘We obviously have not declined his show because of his religious or cultural identity. Philip has performed with us before.’ No, it was because the venue had trawled through Simon’s social-media posts for anything ‘displaying rhetoric or symbology associated with discriminatory groups’.
It seems that Simon has been too keen to support Israel and criticise the kind of people who march in support of Palestine while conveniently forgetting to mention the hostages held by Hamas. Simon has also berated the actors’ union Equity for going beyond its remit by advertising pro-Palestinian marches. In other words, you can be cancelled for supporting the world’s only Jewish state in its war with a genocidal death cult.
Whistlebinkies claimed it acted because of ‘staff safety concerns’. Creeger told Times Radio: ‘When it comes to safety, they said that they felt the extra safety precautions that many Jewish performers are subject to at the moment due to rising antisemitism made them feel, ironically, more unsafe.’ But those safety measures were hardly onerous, such as timing police patrols to sync with the start and end of Jewish shows and having contact numbers to report anti-Semitic incidents.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, where venue staff pull rank to prevent shows going ahead. Former SNP MP Joanna Cherry had her Edinburgh Fringe show blocked by The Stand comedy club in 2023 – until venue management had to concede that doing so was unlawful discrimination against her gender-critical views. This suppression of performers based on having the ‘wrong’ views is epidemic in the arts today. Increasingly, art and entertainment come second to going along with right-on cultural orthodoxy.
But this year’s incidents are worse because Creeger and Simon aren’t political performers. Creeger’s show sends up Jewish stereotypes. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that they are being binned for who they are rather than the nature of their performances.
Fortunately, politics and censorship aside, there will be a huge amount to see during the next three weeks. Scores of established and up-and-coming comedians will be appearing at the Festival, following in a parade of comedy legends from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore via Robin Williams and Mike Myers through to Al Murray and Lee Mack. As for this year’s line-up, I’ll think I’ll swerve Nish Kumar and Josie Long in favour of the ever-reliable (and sometime Battle of Ideas speaker) Geoff Norcott at Underbelly.
Among those to get a first taste of the spotlight at the Fringe were John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson – just two of the nominees for last year’s Battle of Ideas festival balloon debate ‘Who is the world’s greatest comic?’. Other nominees were Norm Macdonald, Louis CK, Galton & Simpson and John Sullivan.
No spoilers about who came out on top - you can watch the debate/banter here:
If you like your humour a bit darker, check out Gabrielle Beasley’s Body Count, billed as ‘a darkly funny feminist thriller’ that ‘takes aim at violence, complicity, and the systems that keep women quiet’. Given the ongoing furore over the case of Sandie Peggie, centred on my local hospital in Fife, it sounds like a show that might capture the zeitgeist for many. It previews in London this coming Saturday at Drayton Arms Theatre before a Festival run at Gilded Balloon Patter House, 13-25 August.
If you’re in and around Edinburgh in the next three weeks, do take the time to see some shows and support the performers. After all, it costs a bloody fortune to appear…