Nick Ahad: Nobody comes out of ‘the biggest art story of the decade’ very well

The Harrogate chap’s tongue was in his cheek, but in elevating the collapse in relations between Opera North, playwright Lee Hall and a Bridlington school to such an historic event, he made me realise that nobody comes out of this with much grace.

It’s a couple of weeks since Lee Hall complained in a national newspaper about the treatment of his libretto for a community show commissioned by Opera North.

Hall claimed he had been asked to remove a gay character from the script. If he didn’t he said Bay Primary School, which had 300 pupils in the production, would remove their co-operation – and their pupils.

Opera North, caught in the middle, asked Hall to change some of the language, specifically the part in the libretto where the gay character was on the receiving end of homophobic abuse.

Hall claimed he was asked to go further and in fact exorcise the gay character from the story – and cyberspace exploded.

Everyone waded in with their thoughts, not least on microblogging site Twitter. Comedian Chris Addison tweeted, “This is as sad as it is disgraceful” Jeannette Winterson said: “No one wants to be seen as homophobic, but it is hard to read this as anything else.”

My own thoughts at the time? It was sad that 300 schoolchildren were going to miss out on performing on stage.

It seems a compromise has been reached and the production will go ahead tomorrow at Bridlington’s Spa. There has been so much to-ing and fro-ing, it’s now impossible to separate opinion from what really went on.

However, if the school threatened to withdraw because of a gay character in a play, shame on them. If Opera North refused to back their writer over inclusion of a gay character, shame on them.

I don’t think the writer is entirely blameless either – going to a national newspaper rather than speaking to the people who commissioned him was a strange decision. But I couldn’t agree more that if the community didn’t want to be involved in an opera because of a gay character, then the community needs to learn tolerance.

Not everyone, even among my colleagues, agrees with me. Some think this kind of subject is too much for such young ears (there are four and five-year-olds in the cast). But surely in our enlightened times there will be schoolchildren who have two mummies, two daddies and all manner of different permutations of “family”.

Art is one of our greatest weapons against ignorance and prejudice and to deny its use as such is sheer philistinism.