Comedian Jake O'Kane criticises 'zealots' who cancelled play
The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) was to have run for two nights in Newtownabbey One of NI's leading comedians has criticised the council "zealots" who have banned a play in County Antrim.
Newtownabbey Borough Council cancelled the Reduced Shakespeare Company's The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged) after complaints that it was blasphemous.
Jake O'Kane said unionist councillors who took the decision "weren't elected to be moral guardians".
Councillor Fraser Agnew said there was a "need to defend Christian values".
The play was to have been staged at Newtownabbey's council-run Theatre at the Mill on 29 and 30 January.
But it was cancelled on Thursday after a meeting of the council's artistic board.
Some councillors had previously called for the show to be cancelled.
'Dead in water'Mr O'Kane said: "I haven't seen the play, and unfortunately I'll never be able to see the play because councillors have decided that we will not be allowed to see the play.
"It's like getting in a time machine and they went back to before the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
"There was £7m spent on this theatre, it opened in 2010, and they may as well close the doors. If they are going to be the moral guardians of what we see and don't see, that theatre is dead in the water.
"We already have laws, we have hate speech laws, that dictate what the arts can and cannot do. If it is hateful, if it is against minorities, the laws are already there to censor that.
"We don't need a bunch of unionist councillors in Newtownabbey deciding what we can or cannot go to see.
"They call themselves moral guardians - they weren't elected to be moral guardians. We elected them to empty our bins, make sure the leisure centres were open - that's the powers they have.
'Humiliated'
Mayor of Newtownabbey Frazer Agnew said the decision was made after taking on board what people and councillors were saying
"They didn't put on their manifesto that they were going to decide what we can or cannot see."
Mr O'Kane told BBC Northern Ireland's Good Morning Ulster that "the vast majority of people in Newtownabbey, I guarantee, are humiliated by this decision".
Mr Agnew, an Ulster Unionist Party representative on the council, said: "Unionists were objecting based on the number of calls they were receiving and some people who had seen the trailer.
"I had a call from a chap who had seen the play, who had trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood, and he advised me that it was blasphemous.
"If it was a play to do with anti-gay material can you imagine the outcry there would be over that, if it was anti-Semitic, if it was anti-Koran... all of those things would create an uproar.
"People weren't going to go, but I think there is this need to defend Christian values."
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