Can actors at the National Theatre quote Christopher Hitchens’ destruction of Shirley Williams for her failure to defend freedom of
speech against suicide murderers on Question Time, while all the time contorting themselves in athletic dance moves? My somewhat surprising answer is ‘yes they can’.
The DV8 dance company’s Can We Talk About This? is almost a compendium of stories I have
covered. The opening section moves from Salman Rushie to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the Danish cartoon ‘crisis’. It maps the opening section of my You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, where I look at the power of religion to provoke
censorship and self-censorship. Inevitably, I focus on radical Islam, which in Europe causes more writers to bite their tongues and throw down their pens than any other clerical force.
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