5 Feet of Fury

Modern artists: craven, stupid, careerist-yet-suicidal cowards

“If there’s going to be a play about ‘inside radical Islam’, it’ll be a profoundly sympathetic, inquiring play, I’m sure,” says the writer of such acclaimed works as Otherwise Engaged.

I can’t imagine a play that’s violently opposed to Islam … you can’t be publicly … and certainly not at the National Theatre.”

Gray describes Hytner’s “fearlessness in attacking Christianity” as “a very easy sort of liberalism that allows [only] yourself, so to speak, to be beaten up”.

“It seems to me that you should say that the reason we didn’t bring that play was because we didn’t want to be bombed,” he says in Standpoint magazine.