Its plot is so explosive that the biggest Edinburgh Fringe promoters turned it down, but a show dramatising the rift between JK Rowling and the stars of Harry Potter is to go ahead this summer.
Terf is written by Joshua Kaplan, a Hollywood scriptwriter, and envisages a “happening” when the grown-up actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint meet the author who helped to make them famous.
Terf stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” and is used to refer to people who do not believe transgender identities are legitimate and oppose including trans women in the feminist movement.
The real-world split between the actors and their former mentor has become emblematic of the row over sex and gender, with the author claiming the trans rights movement is seeking to “erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class”, while the actors, as Grint put it, insist “trans women are women”.
Kaplan, 45, who describes himself as gay and queer, said audiences might guess where he stood “on certain issues”, but stressed his production was not a “message” play.
“The focus is on relationships and how Rowling’s opinions evolved, but it is not interrogating the substance of her opinions,” he said. At its heart, the show exposed how social media had changed the language of debate and kindness and been replaced by “cruel, violent, and unkind” language, Kaplan said.
Entitled
Terf C*** when it was announced in February, the play provoked a hail of online criticism, causing some of
Edinburgh’s biggest venues to turn it down, according to Barry Church-Woods, the producer.
“Ideally, we wanted to be with [the Edinburgh theatre venues] Assembly or Pleasance,” Church-Woods said. “They read it, liked it, but said they were concerned about the disruptions it would cause to their other shows, so they chose to pass on it. The reality of this subject is that it’s so hot that people are responding without reading the script or knowing what the show is. We really struggled to get a platform.”
The show will be staged at St Stephen’s Church in Edinburgh’s New Town.
Kaplan said he had changed the title because he did not want to be seen to be calling people names. “Just the word ‘terf’ in the title is poignant and profound,” he said. The play “holds up a mirror and says to the audience, ‘This is what you are calling people’”, he added.
Kaplan, 45, is a New Yorker and a Yale-educated former lawyer who took up writing in his thirties. He wrote a play for the Academy Award-winning actress Estelle Parsons, before embarking on a master’s in scriptwriting at the University of Southern California and has been working on the highly rated HBO crime drama
Tokyo Vice since its inception in 2022.
Terf , conceived during lockdown, originally drew on some of Rowling’s earliest online interventions, which included a long and considered statement in 2020 that detailed her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender.
Her initial stance was greeted with dismay by Radcliffe, 34, Watson, 34, and Grint, 35, who, in Radcliffe’s words, said it was “important to support transgender people and non-binary people, not invalidate their identities and cause further harm”.
More recently, in the wake of the
Cass review of gender identity services, Rowling, 58, accused her former protégés of having “cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and [using] their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors”.
Kaplan is not the first to raise concern about Rowling’s tone. This month Elon Musk, who bought Twitter/X in 2022, urged the author to change tack while, under the heading “JK Rowling is playing with fire”, Debbie Hayton, a trans journalist and supporter of women’s sex-based rights, said Rowling’s recent tweets about a football referee had “brought out the worst” in the author.
Kaplan has redrafted the play to reflect Rowling’s most recent Twitter/X interventions. He believes written insults on social media are more damaging than things spoken in the heat of face-to-face conversation and even the harshest words between family and friends can fade over time.
“With the spoken word, you are usually in the room or on the phone and you hear the tone; you have a context,” he said.
“When you just see it written down, it becomes part of your story, you internalise it, you think about meaning. You stare at the words over and over again and they hurt in a way they don’t hurt when you are having a conversation.”
He was at a loss to understand
Rowling’s recent change in tone. “I am a huge Harry Potter fan,” Kaplan said, “and one of the most wonderful quotes in her books goes, ‘Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.’
“The play explores how somebody comes to that point [of inflicting injury]. I know she feels extremely passionate about this and that seems to be a consideration that is overriding all others. Or she thinks that the power of words written down is necessary to express her extreme passion on this subject.”
In the pre-Twitter/X world, Kaplan said the row would have been relatively short-lived. “Maybe JK Rowling would have given an opinion in an interview, but it wouldn’t have snowballed into this,” he said. “That’s the world we live in now. It’s not just about her, this is a really huge issue [and] that is the point of the play. Kindness gets lost, humanity gets lost in all of this, and this really hurts for me.”
The playwright added: “I hope the audience will walk out not with a message but a question. I want people to walk out saying, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have put that on Twitter the other day’ or, ‘Maybe if I look at this subject, maybe I should remember the other things this person has done in their life’.”
Rowling may have alienated some Harry Potter stars, but others have remained loyal including Ralph Fiennes, who was cast as the evil Lord Voldemort. In 2021 Fiennes said: “[The] verbal abuse directed at [Rowling] is disgusting, it’s appalling. I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women; but it’s not some obscene, uber right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel like I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’”
Rishi Sunak recently backed Rowling’s criticism of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which creates a
new offence of “stirring up of hatred” for “misgendering” trans people. The prime minister said: “People should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology.”
Feminist writers have also offered their full backing to Rowling, including Helen Joyce, who tweeted support in March after the novelist highlighted abusive comments she received online. Joyce said: “It’s not about what you say, it’s because you’re speaking at all. Keep going! xx.”
Rowling was not available for comment.
[Alogging]
x
