A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.

Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.

On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.

The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.

Given the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.

But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.

The play’s title, “TERF” — an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist — is a pejorative label that Rowling’s critics have applied to her for years. Rowling has gotten into heated debates about gender issues on social media, and she published an essay in 2020 accusing transgender activists of “seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators.” Critics have accused her of being transphobic or anti-trans, which she has denied. Through a spokesman, she declined to comment for this article.

Many “Harry Potter” fans reacted with anguish to Rowling’s statements, though she also has a strong following among women who share her views. Barry Church-Woods, a producer of “TERF,” said that a handful of would-be protesters had attended the play’s premiere. They sat with signs in their laps, apparently ready to demonstrate, he said, but they never raised them. The play, which presents views from both camps, was too balanced to cause serious upset, he added.

Clair Braun, 30, a teacher from Düsseldorf, Germany, who was visiting the festival on vacation, said that she had enjoyed the play but that it was “not what I expected.” Everything she had read in advance had prepared her for a “provocative” show, she said, but instead, she found it “very subdued in the criticism.”

Discussion around transgender rights has recently been particularly heated in Scotland. There have been debates over a government plan to make it easier for people to legally change their gender, around the Scottish health service’s decision to pause hormone treatments for minors and surrounding a law that came into effect this year that made it illegal to “stir up hatred” against transgender people.

Joshua Kaplan, 45, the American playwright behind “TERF,” said that he didn’t know how fraught the discussion in Britain was when he started work on the play. A longtime “Harry Potter” fan, Kaplan said that the idea for the show came to him in 2020 while jogging in Lake Hollywood Park, Los Angeles. As he ran, he received a cellphone notification that Daniel Radcliffe, the star of the “Harry Potter” movies, had written a blog post criticizing Rowling’s social media posts. It felt like witnessing a bitter family feud “playing out in the public eye,” Kaplan said in an interview — perfect material for a play.

Onstage, Rowling (Laura Kay Bailey) attends an upmarket dinner with three actors from her films: Daniel Radcliffe (Piers MacKenzie), Emma Watson (Trelawny Kean) and Rupert Grint (Tom Longmire). When the stars confront Rowling about her social media comments, the cordial dinner descends into farce and detours into imagined scenes from Rowling’s life that have nothing to do with transgender people.

In its opening days, the show received mixed reviews. Dominic Cavendish, in a write-up for The Daily Telegraph called it “absorbing if inconclusive stuff” that skirted scientific and societal questions. Allan Radcliffe, in a review in The Times of London, said the show “ends up an overlong and rather messy slog rather than the sharp satire of the online age it could have been.”

On Monday, Church-Woods said that he had reassured the cast that the reviews were unimportant. Whatever critics might think, he said, the actors had “created a cultural moment.” The world’s media was writing about them, after all.