Greg's point about the role of the police is the crux of it. Before the play had been banned I started a different thread about it (there's a link somewhere above) and what particularly annoyed me then was that when the playwright had received death threats, the police reaction was to advise her to make no public statements. This was a bit like their response to the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie, which was that he should hide from public view for several years (thereby ruining his life) until the fatwah was lifted.

The number of troublemakers was a bit larger than Greg suggested - several hundred last Saturday night, when they broke the foyer's glass frontage and also forced entry backstage. And then there was a shrieking mob of about 400 (according to Channel 4 news) at the Old Rep today, protesting at that theatre's proposal to take over the production. The Old Rep had gone as far as to call the other Rep's capitulation "cowardice" - but having had a taste of what the latter was up against, it has now been forced into the same capitulation.

Perhaps Greg is overly charitable to the "grey-bearded elders". Far from condemning the violence, they have in fact exploited it. But - again as I said in the other thread, and Poppagator said above - some Christian churches hastened to implicate themselves equally by joining the call for a ban. The guy who has been speaking for these churches (self-appointed or not I don't know) is the Catholic archbishop of Birmingham. Entirely fitting, when it is recalled that the Catholic church burnt books rather than see knowledge falling into the hands of the untutored masses.

Hardest to explain is that all three main political parties in Birmingham supported the ban. However Evan Harris, a LibDem spokesperson on the national stage, was vociferous from the outset in supporting the theatre's right to stage the play and to resist pressure to rewrite it.