Edinburgh Fringe 2024
TERF
Civil Disobedience / Theatre of the Existential Void
Genre: LGBTQ+ Theatre, Satire, Theatre
Venue: Assembly Rooms - Ball Room
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
TERF imagines Harry Potter author J K Rowling being confronted about her allegedly transphobic comments by the three stars of the Potter films, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint who try to stage an intervention in a pompous expensive restaurant.
Review
This is a brave, topical, provocative and important play which captures the spirit of what Fringe plays should try to do; be relevant, catalyse discussion and exhibit artistry. It does all of these things, but I suspect, not totally as they had intended. Well worth seeing.
The premise of TERF is that the three main stars of the Harry Potter films, namely Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) are so appalled and fed up with author J K Rowling’s many pronouncements about trans women and gender identity that they stage an intervention. The promise, implicitly and explicitly, is that the play will explore opinions on both sides of this acrimonious debate, and specifically about what and how Rowling has so publicly written and said on the subject. The theatrical device for this exploration is the three young stars ambushing Rowling with an intervention that is intended to shift things, either in Rowling’s behaviour, or in all their relationships (professional and personal) or both.
The play starts with three masked figures (who are difficult to hear because the masks cover their mouths) who read out many of J K Rowling’s allegedly transphobic tweets. The main action of the play begins when Daniel and Rupert are waiting for Rowling in a very expensive, poncey restaurant. They bicker and are intending to tackle Rowling. When she arrives, she is like their rich mother and they, her spoilt rich adult children. When their supposed intervention begins, Emma joins them over Zoom, initially with her agent eavesdropping, only to join them in the restaurant later; she has been hiding in the toilet for some reason. The four characters quarrel and challenge each other, behaving just like a dysfunctional wealthy family who have an older relative with objectionable views. The directness of the challenges escalate but Rowling can give better than she gets and clearly still has the love and listening of the three actors who she made rich and famous. At no point did I feel the three younger characters would cut Rowling (or the Potter benefits) out of their lives. They are family. We get some flashbacks to informative or regrettable moments in Rowling’s personal and professional life.
An intervention is a carefully prepared and meticulously choreographed presentation from multiple key people who love the person with problematic (or self-destructive) behaviour. Clear requests and consequences are laid out if the person does not change and a constructive route out of the problem has been arranged, making the constructive choice now an easier choice. I am not sure if the characters here are supposed to know how to stage a real intervention or not, but what they hatch is not an intervention that sets out why Rowling’s behaviour is a problem and what effect that has had on these three people in her life.
We also don’t get details of her problematic pronouncements because most examples of Rowling’s tweets and inflammatory comments are cut short or spoken over (to avoid repeating the offence?), so we don’t get to hear the specific points Rowling was making. Consequently, those points can’t then be answered.
There is a mostly silent trans waiter who, between scenes, embodies a sort of Trans-Everyperson and is used to give the scene signposts and depict trans women as a punchbag, which undoubtedly they have been and continue to be. What they have not given the trans community in this play is a voice and that was sort of what we were lead to expect on the tin.
Ultimately the play is more about tackling and trying to silence the views and behaviour of an elderly relative who has opinions you find objectionable. This is an interesting phenomenon to explore, especially in the UK today with many taking to the streets with opinions most of us find repugnant. The play is gripping and fascinating throughout; a very professionally staged, acted and directed piece of theatre. However, I think the audience was expecting a detailed and cogent dissection of the trans debate that Rowling has doused with rocket fuel, rather than a dysfunctional, occasionally very funny, family drama. It sends one out thinking about the issues without having added much detail, but is well worth seeing nonetheless as an admirable attempt to create bristlingly relevant theatre on an incendiary subject.
