Soho Theatre tells white audience members to ‘check their privilege’
White audience members attending a comedy show at an Arts Council-funded venue are being asked to “check their privilege at the door”.
Showing at the Soho Theatre in London, the “Femmes of Colour Comedy Club” is billed as “an unapologetic celebration of comedians of colour that are not cis-men”.
In footage from the night, one stand-up comedian jokes that her birthplace Kenya “was a British colony, and when Kenya was a British colony we had to be like the British. We played British board games, we played ‘Guess Who’s Going to Conquer Us Next?’”
Attendees are instructed: “White audience members are encouraged to check their privilege at the door.”
Originating in the US, the phrase “check your privilege” is widely understood as a call for white people to consider how their skin colour has given them unearned advantages in a society.
The expression can also be applied to gender and sexuality, with heterosexual males generally perceived as the most “privileged”.
Soho Theatre receives £614,582 per year from Arts Council England (ACE) and places a strong emphasis on diversity. Opening its now-closed Writers’ Lab programme 2023-24, the theatre said: “We actively welcome applicants who identify as LGBTQ+, disabled, people of the global majority and people living in the London Borough of Waltham Forest.” It added that the global majority meant “people who identify as Black Caribbean, Black African, South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern or Latinx.”
Despite these efforts at inclusion, in February Jewish audience members at a Soho Theatre show by comedian Paul Currie were said to have been left feeling “unsafe” and “threatened”. He allegedly pulled out a Palestinian flag and shouted at one Israeli audience member to “get the f— out of here”, before leading chants of “Palestine will be free”.
Soho Theatre subsequently banned Currie and issued a statement to say that it would “not tolerate intimidation of audience members due to their nationality, race, religion or beliefs”.
Inclusive
Comedian Graham Linehan told The Telegraph: “The thing about comedy is that it’s already inclusive. The best comedians – Dave Chappelle, Shane Gillis, Louis CK – make fun of everyone, often to the delight of their targets, because comedy is truth and audiences don’t like being lied to. The new wave of woke comedy excludes whole swathes of the population, because it has no connection to actual life experience, or the multifarious possibilities of existence outside of woke orthodoxy, and it rejects diversity of thought. This is why woke comedy never goes viral.”
Gareth Roberts, a novelist and screenwriter who has worked on Doctor Who, said: “What we have here is high-status racism of the kind middle class people love throwing money at. There’s a strong financial incentive to churn this desperate stuff out – it’s not culture, it’s a parasitic feedback loop, people talking to themselves using other people’s money.”
Denise Fahmy, co-director of Freedom in the Arts who won an employment tribunal claim of harassment over her gender critical beliefs, told The Telegraph: “The UK is rightly proud of the diversity of our arts scene – and taxpayers’ deserve an arts world that appeals to as many people as possible. But in ACE’s push to ‘diversify’, demanding organisations submit data using crude metrics such as LGBTQ+, the funder ends up driving over-representation of certain groups in the arts who then go on to programme for a niche, subsidised market.
“ACE data very clearly evidences LGBTQ+ workers are over-represented in the sector, comprising 10 per cent of the workforce compared to 3.2 per cent of the population. I’m concerned this collision of data and money is skewing the arts into the frankly weird areas Soho Theatre promotes.”
An ACE spokesman said: “We support fantastic, high-quality, cultural work that caters to the wide range of different tastes of people across the country – from programmes that encourage children to read and learn musical instruments to community choirs; and from grand opera to outstanding theatre that goes on to tour globally.
“Decisions on the artistic programming and day-to-day running of our funded organisations sit with their management team and board.”
