A space for difference (and how dangerous that can feel)

I’ve been hosting Theatre Clubs for a long time now – a whole decade! – and in the first half of 2023 it’s reached its ideal state, with the support of Matt Burman, artistic director at Cambridge Junction. He’s enabled (and paid!) me to establish Theatre Club as a regular, promoted event in the Junction’s programme, which brings together regular attendees, occasional visitors and Junction staff to talk about work that sometimes challenges us, or refuses to fulfil conventional ideas of what theatre is, or what a play might be or do.

The first conversation there, about Kakilang’s Home X – a dance show meets virtual reality game meets participatory piece, in which disparate people talk about their relationships to ideas of home, belonging, citizenship and migration – immediately joined the list of Theatre Clubs I dwell on and discuss with anyone who’ll listen. The particular mix of people meant that we met the show’s content with our own experiences: of moving to another country to live with a partner, and the loneliness wrapped up in that; of growing up in a bilingual household while speaking only English and not the parent tongue; of working with farmers in Cambridgeshire whose families have lived and worked on the same land for multiple generations, 500 years; of leaving England only to return, back to the parental home, an odd place to be for a person in their 30s. In effect, we continued the dialogue and work of reflection that began within the show, discussing what can – given the Hostile Environment established over the 2010s by the Tory government – be contentious topics, but doing so with sympathetic interest and care.

Another of the conversations will remain seared in my memory too, but for less positive reasons. It was derailed by one person expressing transphobic views using a language I’d only otherwise encountered on twitter (one of the many reasons I no longer use twitter). The shock wasn’t that someone attending Theatre Club had different views to others in the conversation: if anything, since the EU referendum of 2016 I’ve consistently argued that this is a space in which politically opposed people might be able to talk together, even about something on which they disagree, with a willingness to listen to differences. Obviously my secret hope is that everyone who comes to Theatre Club will embrace socialist feminist politics eventually – but my bigger, public hope is that these conversations might be moments, however brief or temporary, of positive social change.

This particular dialogue didn’t feel that way, however. It felt aggressive, confrontational, with one person raising their voice at five other people who gently offered different views, only to be shouted and sworn at. I’m not sure how long this went on for – could have been five minutes, ten minutes, twenty – but because a teenager was present, and we were discussing work by young people, it ended with the transphobic person being removed by security guards, brought over from the Junction’s music venue.

To me, this felt like a profound failure of all the ideals I cherish as Theatre Club’s host. The belief in common generosity, in people being willing to listen, in mutual respect. Somehow Theatre Club itself felt broken: instead of an escape from the toxic polarisations of twitter, or the worst conservatism of talk radio, it had become just another venue for them. And if I had written this post in the days that followed, that’s where I might have remained stuck: in the doldrums of disillusionment.

What happened next was small, and might not change much at all. First, I acknowledged to myself that I had listened to this person to respond and rebut them: unsurprising given my refusal to support transphobia, but as a result there were things this person had said that I hadn’t fully heard. Listening to hear is something I’ve thought about through the writings of Rajni Shah: it is integral to the work of care.

Next I started an email conversation with the person (with support from Cambridge Junction), initially expressing regret at the way Theatre Club had ended, and acknowledging an anxiety they had expressed about gender-neutral toilets, but also giving them some resources to the contrary (from the recent past, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, and the immediate present, Matti Wenham’s letter to the Guardian on the problems with trans-exclusionary ‘single-sex’ spaces https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/11/glaring-flaws-in-the-idea-of-excluding-trans-people-from-single-sex-spaces). In a later email I picked up on the person’s insistence that biology is objective and offered a contrary view: that science is an expression of the culture within which research takes place and theories are developed.

I also told the person that they would still be welcome at Theatre Club, but expressing a key concern: that there are artists who work at Cambridge Junction who are gender non-conforming, and that overhearing such discriminatory views would make them feel unsafe in their place of work. Matt Burman also underlined that Cambridge Junction is a proudly inclusive venue, active in their support of the rights of trans people (and indeed against discrimination in all its forms). This did not feel compatible with the views this person had expressed.

To put the responsibility back on the person for how they behave in public space, and how they hold prejudicial views of trans people, felt – still feels – risky. To me, it’s an ethical position that I don’t exclude this person from future Theatre Clubs: to do so would be to diminish the space, to say that Theatre Club can’t hold difference after all. And yet, I don’t want to give a platform to transphobia, or any other kind of discrimination. There’s a paradox here, that I struggle to navigate: how to challenge, unpick, offer alternatives to discrimination and prejudice if you block entirely its expression?

There are no easy answers, but I’ve found a lot of support in two books that think about these questions deeply. One is Conflict Is Not Abuse, in which Sarah Schulman repeatedly makes the point that shunning people – refusing to speak with them – is itself a form of harm. The other is We Will Not Cancel Us, in which Adrienne Maree Brown argues that society – or rather, its systems of ‘white supremacy, male supremacy, ableist supremacy, straight supremacy, cis supremacy, and more’ – won’t change through ‘isolating and picking off individuals’. Instead, people need to ‘get excellent at being in conflict, which is a healthy, natural part of being human and biodiverse’.

I agree, and also… I fear conflict! Adrienne Maree Brown speaks to this too: to the difference between acting from fear and from discernment – discernment being more reflective, more open to complexity, and potentially transformative. Acting from fear, I would ask the transphobic person not to return to Theatre Club as I don’t want to risk such views being voiced again, or being responsible for any harm that might result from that. Acting from discernment, I recognise my own fear and consider new ways to articulate how difference is welcome, but discrimination isn’t.

There’s been another Theatre Club since then, which the person did attend – and it was genuinely a pleasure to have them there. They didn’t particularly enjoy the show (by Forced Entertainment: others at Theatre Club felt the same), but how they expressed this was interesting, as were the references they made to things the show made them think about. I’m under no illusions that this person has experienced an overnight change of heart in their views on trans people as a result of our exchanges over the past month. I still feel some fear around how these views might be expressed in the future. My anxiety is exacerbated by the wider context: the fascist turn of the mainstream dialogue about gender in the UK (and the US); the rising confidence of hate groups targetting people who are gender non-conforming; the ease with which hate can turn into legislation. I don’t think I’m being naive in insisting on a difference between this context and the person I encountered.

And I don’t think I’m naive about Theatre Club itself. It’s designed to be a space for dialogue, not shunning trouble, not shunning difference, seeking a way forward through listening and care. For a while I was disillusioned by how easily that space could be broken. But the longer story says something different about what the work of Theatre Club entails.