A leading British playwright has accused Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre's creative director, of being unwilling to put on plays critical of Islam.
Speaking in this month's Standpoint magazine, Simon Gray said "I can't imagine a play that's violently opposed to Islam. You can't be - publicy, so to speak, and certainly not at the National."
Gray said: "The National Theatre has an orthodoxy. I remember Nick saying, very proudly, that they'd put on the Jerry Springer show, that they were fearless in attacking Christianity.
"But somehow you didn't hear his voice when that Sikh play [Behzti, a play protested by a number of Sikhs when staged in Birmingham] was taken off... It seems to me that you should say that the reason we didn't bring that play was because we didn't want to be bombed... It seems to me a very easy sort of liberalism that allows only yourself, so to speak, to be beaten up."
He then went on to say that "if there's going to be a play about 'inside radical Islam', it'll be a profoundly sympathetic, inquiring play, I'm sure."
Hynter has reacted furiously to the accusation, with his spokesman saying "so much of what he's said is factually incorrect. It's ridiculous. Nicholas has never been anti-Christian, that's not what Jerry Springer was about. And when Behzti was cancelled he was extremely outspoken about it and criticised the police and politicians."
