So the Barbican have pulled Exhibit B, thanks to the protests of a group of 200 outside the theatre (and the 20,000 signatures collected on a petition against it.) Brett Bailey, the white South African behind the installation – which featured black actors chained and in cages in a series of tableaux vivants - made no secret of the fact that it was designed to shock.
His argument was that his recreation of a 'human zoo' confronted spectators, and made them skin-crawlingly complicit, with "colonial atrocities", contemporary racism, and current attitudes to asylum seekers. But while those who gave the show five stars in Edinburgh, including Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner, found in it an unbearable truth, for others such as Simon Wooley, former equalities and human rights commissioner, Exhibit B itself was exploitative, "objectifying people in a humiliating way".
For me, while Bailey's arguments were powerful – not least the fact that as he pointed out, many of those mostly deeply offended hadn't seen it - it was the testimonies of his actors that persuaded me that this wasn't a cheap spectacle, but a piece of art worth seeing. I feel sorry that I won't be able to now.
It's easy to believe that the battle for artistic freedom of expression was won back in the 1960s and 70s, with Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Romans in Britain. But, as Exhibit B proves, while the Lord Chamberlain and Mary Whitehouse are no longer deciding what we can or cannot see in the theatre, Twitter outrage and the online petition can be equally effective in closing down the controversial. Exhibit B is shocking – for the censorship of a piece of serious theatre in 2014.
