Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024: Controversial JK Rowling-inspired show TERF finds a new home at Assembly
Producers of controversial Fringe show TERF have announced a new venue with festival mainstay Assembly Festival.
Written by US screenwriter and playwright Joshua Kaplan and produced by Edinburgh production house Civil Disobedience and Theatre of the Existential Void, TERF focuses on the controversy surrounding JK Rowling’s views on transgender rights.
The 80-minute production faced a cancellation threat last month amidst a flurry of controversy, leading the company to seek a new host venue.
Assembly, a staple of the Fringe experience for 44 years, has now stepped in to offer a new home for TERF.
Dani Rae, managing director of Assembly Festival said: “We’re pleased to be able to provide a stage for Joshua Kaplan and the team at Civil Disobedience in bringing TERF to this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Fringe has always been an open access festival and there’s no better place to explore important balanced talking points such as this.”
TERF considers the recent and ongoing events through the lens of a fictional intervention organised by Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson.
Through their conversations and imagined flashbacks to the author’s earlier life, TERF investigates the causes, and potential consequences, of Rowling’s public, highly charged relationship with the transgender community.
Over the past several years, Rowling’s tweets around transgender rights – including single-sex spaces, gender-affirming care, and trans identity – have served to inflame the public discussion.
TERF focusses on the relationships between Rowling and Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson to contextualise Rowling’s evolution from an exceedingly private author to a polarising public figure.
TERF seeks to understand, not only the author herself, but also the generational, political, and sociocultural divisions that have turned the debate over the rights of a historically marginalised community into a massive issue.
According to Kaplan, the production is "very excited to be presenting TERF at one of the premiere Edinburgh Fringe venues and extraordinarily grateful to Assembly for providing a space for this increasingly important conversation".
Tickets for the show at Assembly Festival go on-sale on Monday, July 8. Customers who bought tickets for the show at the original venue of St Stephen's will be offered a refund and the opportunity to book new tickets for the Assembly run.