Soho Theatre tells white people to ‘check your privilege at door’

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 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 it actively welcomed applicants who identified as LGBTQ, disabled, people of the Global Majority and “people living in the London Borough of Waltham Forest”

“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”.

Graham Linehan, the Father Ted co-creator, said: “The thing about comedy is that it’s already inclusive. The best comedians 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.”

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.”