‘Offensive’ play set to premiere 20 years after ban

A PLAY banned by a celebrated Edinburgh theatre as being “too offensive” two decades ago is finally to be performed, in the building once earmarked to house the Scottish Parliament.

The former Royal High School on the capital’s Calton Hill will be transformed into a temporary theatre to allow award-winning playwright Jo Clifford’s work to get its world premiere.

War in America was turned down by the Royal Lyceum Theatre when the script was submitted in 1996.

Written a year before the demise of John Major’s Conservative government and set in the near future, the play is billed as “a hard-hitting portrait of a degenerate European democracy, rife with corruption, hypocrisy, division and distrust, set against the backdrop of a religious war in America”.

Edinburgh City Council, which owns the 1829 neoclassical old Royal High building, has given permission for the play to go ahead in the debating chamber.

It was refurbished ahead of the 1979 devolution referendum, for the proposed Scottish Assembly. However the referendum did not deliver the majority required for devolution to proceed.

Jo Clifford, who has written more than 80 plays, said: “I’d forgotten all about the play. I felt it was just awful. But when I read it again earlier this year I thought it was really good and up to-the-minute.

“One of the things I imagine in the play is an almost terminal decay of Westminster party politics, which we’re living through now, and a state of civil war in America, which we’re very much on the edge of. I thought: ‘My God, I saw all this coming’.”