It is more than 50 years since a naked girl raced across the stage of an Edinburgh Fringe show, causing palpitations among the audience and outrage in the city chambers. The redoubtable Moira Knox, city councillor and bastion of moral standards, denounced the performance as an offence to common decency and threatened to close down not only the show but the entire festival.<\/p>\n
Then, as now, an attempt to censor this most anarchic of events was doomed to failure. So frequent and so unsuccessful were Ms Knox\u2019s protests that she herself became a regular on the Fringe. People would turn up at a show where she was protesting to witness and applaud the confrontation. Jim Rose, whose infamous 1980s circuses once featured a man hanging an iron weight from his testicles, would make Ms Knox his first port of call, and used her expressions of shock and horror as a way of advertising his shows. To be fair to the councillor, she came gradually to accept that, like King Canute, she was confronting an unstoppable force. Today audiences are more likely to protest if there is an absence of nudity on stage.<\/p>\n
So, when taking a view on the latest offence to taste and decency, the proposed performance by Dr Philip Nitschke, also known as Dr Death, who will demonstrate a \u201cdeliverance machine\u201d on stage, and invite members of the audience to experience what it would be like to end their lives, it is worth remembering that he is only the latest in a long and not always honourable tradition.<\/p>\n
Those who object to his act, which will involve volunteers coming on stage to inhale a gas which will, he insists, be non-lethal, are of course protesting not just at a breach of good taste but at what they see as an advertisement for assisted suicide. One campaigner against moves to legalise it describes it as a glib encouragement to suicide, and a deliberate attempt to court controversy.<\/p>\n
There does not seem to be much that is glib about it. Inviting the public to contemplate what it would be like to kill themselves is, on the contrary, pretty profound. It may offend, it may be distasteful, it may even be immoral, but then that is a pretty fair description of the Fringe itself. Staying on the right side of the law is one thing that every performer has to consider. Offending good taste is quite another. Testing the boundaries is, after all, what the Fringe is all about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is more than 50 years since a naked girl raced across the stage of an Edinburgh Fringe show, causing palpitations among the audience and outrage in the city chambers. The redoubtable Moira Knox, city councillor and bastion of moral standards, denounced the performance as an offence to common decency and threatened to close down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n