Memorable British musicals in recent years have tackled difficult, challenging and dark subjects including serial murder and trial by TV. Next up: what if Katie Hopkins was murdered?
The Assassination of Katie Hopkins is a provocatively titled musical scheduled to open in spring next year which uses her fictional death as a way to explore wider issues of “truth, celebrity and public outrage”.
The rightwing Mail Online columnist divides opinion like few others. She is detested or loved. The show’s co-writer, Chris Bush, said she hoped the production would challenge audiences’ preconceptions about Hopkins.
“She is someone who generates very, very strong opinions, positively or negatively, and what interests me as a writer is challenging assumptions.”
Hopkins will not be a visible character on stage but her death is the trigger for the narrative and her presence looms large over events.
“We have been going back and forth on whether we mind if she hates it,” said Bush. “But is it worse if she loves it?”
Bush has written the words while Matt Winkworth has composed the music. It will receive its world premiere at Theatr Clwyd in north Wales next April, directed by James Grieve, artistic director of touring theatre company Paines Plough.
While fictional, the work will be presented as if it is a piece of verbatim theatre.
Bush said it would examine social media, the mob mentality it encourages and the limits of free speech. “Does having the right to a voice give you a right to a platform?”
It will also explore reaction to reports of a high-profile death. Was it right that some people organised street parties after the death of Thatcher, Bush asked?
Bush admitted she was “slightly terrified” by elements of social media. “I think it is very easy to think there isn’t any real world impact to writing something online or sharing something.”
The show would, Bush hoped, raise difficult questions rather than laying out a manifesto or having an argument she wanted to win.
Hopkins first came to the public’s attention in 2007 when, as a “global brand consultant”, she was a rancorous, bitchy, highly entertaining candidate on The Apprentice.
That was followed later the same year by I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! when she was a late replacement for Malcolm McLaren, and an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.
By then she was known as a rightwing controversialist with columns for first the Sun and then Mail Online. Barely a week went by – still goes by – without Hopkins saying something disgraceful or outrageous.
In columns, tweets and interviews Hopkins has admired the “efficiency” of Ebola, said she does not like fat people, berated the “mammary militia breastfeeding en masse in Costa”, suggested that Justin Bieber could be the next Amy Winehouse and complained that dementia sufferers are bed blockers.
Her tweets get her into particular trouble. She had to leave her weekly Sunday show at radio station LBC after calling for a “final solution” following the Manchester arena terrorist attack.
Earlier this year she lost a court libel case brought by the writer and food blogger Jack Monroe in a row over tweets suggesting Monroe had approved of the defacing of a war memorial during an anti-austerity demonstration in Whitehall.
Bush said Hopkins’ views were not ones she had much time for.
“I disagree with the vast majority of what Katie Hopkins has to say … politically I couldn’t be much further from where she is on a spectrum.
“Whether she is useful or has any right to say what she says is a much more complicated question.”
The production continues a trend of musicals burrowing into less traditional subjects, from Jerry Springer the Opera to London Road, which was a verbatim account of how lives were affected by a series of murders in Ipswich.
