2 days ago
Kate Forbes's treatment at the Edinburgh Fringe was a farce
Summerhall is one of Edinburgh's largest Fringe venues, also running year-round exhibitions and artistic performances. This past week, it has also played host to the city's latest site-specific beclowning show, with artists so reportedly 'terrified' by Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes being in the building, they had to set up a 'safe room' on the day she was booked to be there.
Forbes is apparently so dangerous to your average avant-garde theatre-maker or performance poet, using Summerhall's many spaces for their Fringe run, that management at the venue issued a grovelling apology to these notional adults:
A fragility and intolerance of others, an anti-arts politics even, has been permitted to spread
Summerhall Arts' primary concern is the safety and wellbeing of the artists and performers we work with, and going forward we will be developing robust, proactive inclusion and wellbeing policies that would prevent this oversight in our bookings process happening again.
With such overblown rhetoric and handwringing, your average person still living in reality may suspect something appalling happened. Did Forbes goosestep across the atrium? Call for an immediate ban on stage make-up? Did she bring some kind of weapon to the venue, which was awarded £608,302 of public cash from Creative Scotland in January?
It's worse. She came to the building, was asked questions by the Herald's Andrew Learmonth, in front of a paying audience who wanted to hear her, then left again. Frightening.
Forbes was booked to take part in the Herald's Unspun Live talk-show series on 6 August. Leaving aside the irksome rise in political interview shows at what is supposed to be an arts festival, it's entirely ordinary she would do so.
A diminutive 5ft 2, Scotland's not-remotely-dangerous deputy First Minister has an earned reputation of being a capable, diligent and principled legislator who, until the recent announcement she'll be leaving parliament at the 2026 elections, was tipped to be a future First Minister.
She also holds gender-critical views. Despite these being entirely lawful, they bring instant pariah status in the arts world. In addition to the heresy of believing in the law of the literal land, which states that women and men are not each other, and that the former require single-sex spaces sometimes, Forbes is also a devout Christian.
Her religious views wouldn't have permitted her to vote for same-sex marriage had she been in parliament at the time that Act was passed. She has also said she'd personally never have an abortion. Both viewpoints arguably scuppered her leadership bid against former First Minister Humza Yousaf in 2023, despite his devout Muslim beliefs likely being similar. If you want to impose a double standard on a woman, of course, it suddenly becomes very easy to know what one is.
It says something ugly about both the state of the arts and freedom of expression that a venue in a city once celebrated as the 'home of the Enlightenment' wishes to apologise for a mild-mannered political leader saying things some people disagree with. In my recent experience, however, as someone formerly embedded in Scotland's artistic community, I know that using one's art form to explore difficult, controversial issues is in itself a downward trend.
The performing arts have been inculcating such a navel-gazing, relentless focus on the self – whether one's sexuality or the ever-nebulous 'gender identity' – that it has made a great deal of its practitioners about as edgy as a floral-patterned fabric circle. A fragility and intolerance of others, an anti-arts politics even, has been permitted to spread.
It's not normal for artists to act this way – something younger performers perhaps may not be aware of. It's also not remotely acceptable – or lawful – for a venue in receipt of taxpayers' funds to say they may in future ban people with Forbes's views from their programming. The dramas created by these types are often worthy of a Fringe First award.
A stunning display of both comedy and farce, good fodder for column inches and baffled conversations with like-minded peers. But, for those of us who value the arts, freedom of speech, and democracy, this is yet another example of a growing tragedy.
