Written by Ella Carmen Dale
When I started writing GAMEPLAY, Daily Mail theatre critic Quentin Letts wasn't in it. Then, gradually, he became impossible to ignore. The man described by Andrzej Lukowski as “the chief bogeyman of British theatre’s critical fraternity”, by Simon Stephens as a “sh*head” and a “f*hole”. The man who, cockroach-like, managed to survive even the Royal Shakespeare Company calling him a racist on one occasion.
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Placing Letts on the therapist couch, it seems evident that, underneath the right-wing swagger, his fundamental motivation is to conflate experimental performance with degeneracy; there is a moral dimension to his ravings, underpinned by the idea that plays with five-act structures, with characters, with entrances and exits and props and scenery, are in some sense fundamentally good and pure on some level.
GAMEPLAY is a show in part about the inadequacy of classical dramatic structures to articulate the truth of the world as it appears in 2026. As such, hovering over my drafts, was Quentin Letts, like the ghost of Christmas culture wars. If you're making politically engaged theatre in Britain, Quentin Letts occupies a strange place in the imagination. Whether or not he'll ever see your work is almost beside the point. He's become a shorthand for a particular fantasy of hostile reception. The imagined voice saying this is what's wrong with modern theatre.
This paranoia is not unfounded. Take Josie Dale-Jones’ 2022 Family Sex Show, a project designed to provide age-appropriate education on body autonomy and boundaries, leapt on by a feverish right wing press and promptly cancelled before it ever opened. Or The Royal Exchange’s 2024 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its references to the Israeli genocide and trans rights, also pulled over fears of conservative backlash. In the arena of UK theatre, the so-called champions of free speech have yet again proven themselves to be raging hypocrites.
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This has a direct effect on our work. In writing GAMEPLAY, I realised something slightly embarrassing: I was writing parts of the show defensively. I was pre-empting reviews that didn't exist, arguing with a man who wasn't in the room. Arguing with Quentin Letts as a symbol of right wing reaction. That felt revealing. GAMEPLAY is a show about imagination. Not the whimsical sort that gives us dragons and fairy tales, but the everyday political act of imagining futures, disasters and enemies. The show argues that we use imagination to predict catastrophe. To justify invasions. To fall in love. To decide who belongs and who doesn't.
Which raises an awkward question. If I can conjure a fictional Quentin Letts into existence, what responsibility do I have for the version I create? The Quentin Letts who appears in GAMEPLAY begins as exactly the figure you'd expect. Irritable. Reactionary. Slightly baffled by alcohol-free beer. The sort of man who doesn’t like tote bags with political slogans on them. But then something shifts. The show asks audiences to imagine the outbreak of nuclear war while they're sitting in the theatre. Suddenly Quentin isn't outside the work judging it. He's trapped inside it with everyone else. His status evaporates. Nobody cares that he's Quentin Letts anymore. Nobody cares what he'll write.
He stops being a critic and becomes simply another human being trying to understand what's happening before it's too late. It's very easy to laugh at people we've reduced to symbols. It'smuch harder, and, I think, much more worthwhile, to imagine them as frightened. There's a line in the show where I say that theatre isn't magic, that imagination isn’t magic. Imagination is real. It's a thing people do. That cuts both ways. We imagine apocalypse. We imagine hope.
I’m not quite self-important enough to think that GAMEPLAY will cause a cultural furore like the aforementioned examples, but I do think there’s no harm in speaking back to these figures of reaction, not just to call them f*holes (although this is a vital endeavour as well) but to declare that their solutions are inadequate and their worldviews impoverished. When the permacrisis reaches our shores, no amount of futile sniping in the comments sections about DEI, the woke mind virus or snowflakes will save Quentin Letts, though I doubt he and the other frothing-mouthed soldiers of the culture war will realise this in time. Either way, I’m looking forward to dragging Quentin out of his comfortable seat in the audience and putting him centre stage for a month at the Edinburgh Fringe. Let’s see how he fares.
GAMEPLAY runs at The Pleasance Dome at 2.40pm from 5th to 31st August 2026 (not 17th). For tickets visit https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/gameplay
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