This is the poster designed to promote John Ford's 1633 play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, which is being staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It has been criticised by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds for using the image of the Virgin Mary with Christ. Indeed, it seems particularly provocatively timed to be displayed during Holy Week and on the run-up to Easter Sunday. John Grady, from the diocese, described it as 'crass' and a 'marketing stunt'.
His Grace is a little puzzled. The play is about Annabella and Giovanni, a brother and sister who involve themselves in an erotic, incestuous relationship in a corrupt and violent Italy. They pursue their illicit passions to the play's dark denoument.
Quite what that has to do with Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey is completely beyond His Grace, other than that it's set in Italy and the play has a religious element, just as virtually all of them tended to during that era.
His Grace would simply wish to draw the attention of his readers and communicants to a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in 2005 at the Barbican Theatre. The text, as written, demands the burning of the Qur'an on-stage with quite few cursings addressed to Mohammed. But the offending sections were cut so the audience did not hear Tamburlaine say that the Prophet was ‘not worthy to be worshipped’ or that he ‘remains in hell’. The artistic director, Simon Reade, said that such phrases ‘would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions’.
This great text was bowdlerised, essentially on ‘health and safety’ grounds.
And let us not think that theatres are attuned only to the sensitivities of Muslims: in the same year, some 400 members of the Sikh community descended on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to demand the play Behzti (‘dishonour’) be cancelled because it caused them offence. The theatre duly obliged.
Christians will not, of course, descend upon the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and the theatre won't take a blind bit of notice of anything muttered by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds. Instead, those who designed the poster will glory in a stunningly effective advertising campaign which has spread the length and breadth of the country without them spending an extra penny.
If (as, sadly, it appears) the theatres are once again to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain of equality and diversity, why is Christianity subsumed to what many may consider to be alien religions and foreign faiths?
