Rowling In It (King’s Head, London)
Verdict: Terf wars
When actors appear in a flop, they sometimes, erm, forget to include it on their CV. But Laura Kay Bailey has written and performs this ‘part true, part fake’ show about starring in TERF at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe.
For anyone not in the know, TERF is an acronym – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist – used to describe someone who calls themselves a feminist, but believes that transgender women are not women at all.
In TERF, the play, Texan actor Bailey portrayed Harry Potter creator JK Rowling, vilified by trans activists for her views on women’s sex-based rights.
Writer/director Joshua Kaplan imagined former child actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson staging an ‘intervention’ for what they call Rowling’s ‘transphobic bullshit’. Unsurprisingly, it generated oodles of pre-publicity from the media storm that blew up around it.
My lips are sealed…or maybe not: Texan actress Laura Kay Bailey turned her experience of playing JK Rowling on the Edinburgh Fringe into a one-woman comedy
But rather than exploring a controversial topic with any insight, TERF turned out to be a damp squib – an inept drama with wooden dialogue and stilted acting. It was a hot topic, served cold.
So I’m pleased to say that Bailey has now written a funny and engaging one-woman show about the whole sorry episode, in which (playing multiple characters from the Fringe production) she describes chaotic rehearsals, multiple rewrites and a fraught run to ever smaller audiences.
She’s brutally honest about clashing egos and the creatives’ endless discussions about pronouns and which toilet a trans member of the cast might use.
There are amusing WhatsApp exchanges shown on the onstage screen and there’s a clever snipe about ‘intersectionality’ when, as Bailey points out, everybody involved in the production was white.
Toilet troubles: Bailey recounts how, on the set of TERF, there were discussions, led by creatives, about which loos cast members should use
Bailey rather has her cake and eats it as she ‘both sides’ the treatment of Rowling. But it’s clear she came to view the author – a domestic abuse survivor – as a strong and determined woman who deserves some admiration for sticking to her guns.
And, as she weaves in anecdotes about her own life, Bailey comes to recognise similar qualities in herself as a stressed mother and wife, and an actor who just wants to shine.
Her play is an interesting delve into identity and actorly ambition, and under Dominic Shaw’s direction it Rowls along.
Rowling In It runs at the King’s Head until April 18.
