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BBC News
13-08-2025
- BBC News
Manchester Arena bomb plotter charged with prison guard attack
The brother of the man who carried out the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing has been charged with attempting to murder three prison officers and assaulting a fourth. This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.
Telegraph
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Labour's new definition of Islamophobia will be disastrous for theatre
Since 9/11, there have been more than 90 deaths and an injury count of about 1,000 as a result of Islamic terrorist incidents in the United Kingdom. Given public concern about the terror threat in particular and Islamism in general, you might think that theatres would be staging work that explores violent religious extremism and the challenges facing liberal democracies. But 20 years on from the 7/7 bombings, it feels as though major theatrical responses to these pressing topics are in short supply. Go into a West End theatre and you'll face a bag search (and with the implementation of 'Martyn's Law' – named after a victim of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing – counter-terrorism will become even more of a concern for venues). But that reality rarely impinges on our stages. Playwrights have gone from being relatively outspoken about extremism during the 'War on Terror' to being oddly muted now. Is it fear of reprisals? There are security concerns but I don't think the climate, as things stand, is impossibly intimidatory. The focus has shifted, post the October 7 attacks of 2023, to Gaza and Israel, with feelings so inflamed that the majority of theatre has gone into shut-down mode. Manchester Royal Exchange's cancellation of its autumn production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year, owing in part to a pro-Palestinian statement embedded within it, would suggest nervousness across the board. But even before that, it felt as though theatre was disengaging from the subject. Yes, we've seen a welcome surge of plays about Muslim lives – Waleed Akhtar's Olivier-winning The P Word (2022), Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan's Peanut Butter and Blueberries (2024) and Emteaz Hussain's Expendable (2024), which broached grooming gangs, to name three. But how Islam might broadly affect Britain has drifted to the sidelines. On the one hand, it's possible there has been increased sensitivity about the risk of promoting extremism. Take the furore over Homegrown – a look at the radicalisation of young Muslims by Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif for the National Youth Theatre. The play was cancelled in 2015, owing to NYT's artistic director Paul Roseby's concerns about its 'extremist agenda'. That felt like a missed opportunity to grapple with a crucial subject. On the other hand, as with today's political debate, theatre practitioners (almost exclusively Left-leaning) might be fearful of finding themselves being lumped in with the far-Right if they don't tread carefully. Who will write the difficult, defining plays on the subject? And will they be supported? The worry is that circumspection will become entrenched once – as expected – the Government adopts a definition of anti-Muslim hatred/ Islamophobia, which will be rolled out across the public sector, without parliamentary consultation. This will be based on an undisclosed proposed definition by the working group established earlier this year, chaired by Dominic Grieve KC, which has now finished its call for evidence. The wrangle over the 2018 APPG's (All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims) definition of Islamophobia – as a form of racism – indicates how fraught this will likely be; that was adopted by the Labour Party and the London Assembly under Sadiq Khan but was opposed by the think-tank Civitas and set aside by the (Tory) government in 2019. While reassuring noises have been made that the new definition will be non-legislative and compatible with the 'unchanging' right of citizens to exercise freedom of speech and expression, I find it implausible that it won't have a negative impact on the arts, and live performance especially. Why? Because I suspect that organisations in need of funding, whether from the Arts Council or local councils, will instinctively avoid or neuter work that might draw accusations of Islamophobia – which in its earliest description, by the race equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust in 1997, was summed up as 'unfounded hostility to Islam'. Once institutionalised as a label, it seems bound to become ubiquitous – not only making officialdom nervous but causing an indirect climate of censorship via peer pressure. Part of theatre's purpose is to hold a mirror up to society, and a culture which restricts its areas of concerns is hastening its way to irrelevance. We owe that sense of mission to the ancient Greeks – who looked at the demands of the state, the commands of faith and the imperatives of the individual: the fanaticism of a religious cult in The Bacchae, our capacity to go mad and self-destruct in Medea. Theatre goes to the darkest places, and in doing so, sheds essential light. Often it has run the gauntlet of disapproval and censorship: nearing the end of its run in the West End, Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession was banned in its day for its portrayal of prostitution but valuably anatomised dire economic realities. Of course, theatre must be pluralistic, nuanced and give voice to a wide range of people and subjects – whether it's climate change or social care – and entertain us to boot, but there can be no elephants in the room. In the recent past, theatre didn't duck the issue of Islamic extremism. The National under Nicholas Hytner, in particular, seized the initiative, attracting controversy with Richard Bean's 2009 satire England People Very Nice, which comically stereotyped East End immigrant communities over the centuries, with radicalised Islam entering the scene in the third act. In 2012, DV8's Can We Talk About This? was a deft, thought-provoking survey of Western liberalism and Islamic extremism, ranging from the Rushdie Affair to the Danish 'Muhammad cartoons' furore. In 2018, the RSC staged a rewrite of Tartuffe that relocated Molière's comedy about faux-religiosity to the Pakistani-Muslim community in Birmingham (with the play's credulous patriarch falling under the spell of a radical mystic). This wasn't about vilifying a faith group from a position of privilege. It was laying claim to theatre as a rigorous but playful means of lampooning foibles as old as time and the allure of affected devoutness. It is increasingly hard to imagine such a production being staged today, yet the RSC's Tartuffe is just as relevant now as it was seven years ago. As the debate around Islamophobia rages, theatre needs to be up for the fight. The way things seem to be going, though, that looks worryingly unlikely.
