Understairs in Liquidation
It is very tempting to those of us who are determined to defend freedom of speech to blame the pastor and members of the Apostolic Church, who withdrew from their agreement with Understairs Arts, for the demise of the new Fringe venue management company. After all, it was their actions (including their desire to censor what was shown at the venue) which, according to Understairs, led directly to the company going into liquidation.
It’s very tempting but it would be very wrong. I am, as I have forcefully said on many occasions, totally opposed to censorship in theatre, but here we have a situation in which a church has decided that something should not be shown in its building. We might disagree with their reasoning (and, to be honest, it is weak) but it is their building and they have the absolute right to decide what can and cannot be performed there.
From what one can gather, Upstairs had agreed that they could have sight of scripts in advance, which to me - and, I suspect, to most people - meant that they had de facto script approval. Either Understairs should not have agreed to this (which would probably have meant they wouldn’t have had the use of the building in the first place) or they should have agreed to the church’s demands and, perhaps, swapped the show in question with another, less contentious one from one of their other two venues. It would have been awkward, perhaps even embarrassing in their dealings with the theatre company, but it was the only way out.
In any case, they brought the problems on themselves and cannot blame the church. We may think that the church was being very narrow minded - after all, from what we know of the play, what the church objected to was shown as being wrong anyway - but it has a perfect right both in law and morally to decide to what use its premises can be put.
I never thought that I would find myself defending censorship but here we have a case of two rights conflicting and we must apppy the principle that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. If the church had withdrawn because of something Upstairs was presenting in one of the other venues, that would have been censorship and deserving of condemnation, but when it claims the right to decide what happens on premises it owns, then we must defend that right. Who knows? we might want to claim the same right at some time!