The Assassination of Katie Hopkins’ creators wish her ‘a long and healthy life’
PASADENA, CA – JULY 29: Katie Hopkins at ‘Sex, Presidents & Handmaids Hosted by Lady Freak’ panel during Politicon at Pasadena Convention Center on July 29, 2017 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for Politicon)
Despite calling their musical The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, its creators have said that they wish her “nothing but a long and healthy life.”
The musical, which opens to the public on April 26 at the Emlyn Williams Theatre in north-east Wales, will examine the outrage prompted by Hopkins’ fictional death.
The columnist for Canadian far-right website The Rebel Media, who was fired by MailOnline in November, posted mocking tweets on Thursday about transgender people.
(Ian Forsyth/Getty)
She said she told her son that “binary-gender thinking has no place in society and adandonned [sic] him at the side of the dual carriageway to reflect on his wanton cis-privilege.”
When asked by a faux-concerned fan if she had assumed her son’s gender, she responded: “Holy sh*t I did. *trots off to self-flagellate with a maxi-tampon purchased from a non-gendered supermarket aisle*.”
Last month, Hopkins made a jibe about Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black’s announcement that they were expecting a baby, with comments which fans called “ignorant” and “homophobic.”
(Charley Gallay/Getty)
But Chris Bush, the writer behind Assassination of Katie Hopkins, told the BBC that her musical was “not leftish wish fulfilment.”
She continued: “It absolutely isn’t an invitation. However much we might disagree, we wish no ill will to her.
“Unless you think Death of a Salesman is encouraging people to go and kill salesmen, then a show called The Assassination of Katie Hopkins is in no way an invitation or an incitement.”
The Assassination of Katie Hopkins
Instead, Bush said, it was a musical about sexism and the way that society has become polarised to a dangerous level.
“It’s important that this show is focused around a woman, because controversial, outspoken women are still judged far more harshly, and held to much different standards in the public eye than men are,” said Bush.
“That’s something that’s worth digging into and exploring.
“It needs to be a divisive figure in terms of how it challenges how we have respect for the dead and how we value life. The Assassination of David Attenborough would be a very different show.”
Katie Hopkins (ITV)
Director James Grieve said Hopkins was more than welcome to see the musical.
“I sort of hope she comes to see it,” he said. “Because it won’t be what she thinks it is, it won’t be what she expects it to be, and I’m genuinely fascinated about what she’d think about it.
“I hereby invite her,” he added. “I’d absolutely love to hear her review.”
Grieve said he had received “a couple” of death threats before the show has even started, with its creators “defended and attacked with equal levels of ferocity, even though the vast majority of people who are talking about us at the moment have never met us and have no idea what we’re doing.”
But, he said, this was “what the show’s about. This bizarre point that we’ve reached in society where the only way people feel comfortable being oppositional is to take the absolute extreme oppositional view.
“What seems to be happening to us as a society is that we seem to be shouting ever louder at each other across an ever widening void. And that means the conversation is making less and less sense.”
