Dame Maureen Lipman has called on an actor who withdrew from a West End play she was involved over her pro-Israel views to “grow up”, stop being “so cowardly” and speak to her directly. The Times has the story.
The veteran actress said that Gerard McCarthy made no attempt to contact her before announcing that he was withdrawing from the production over Lipman’s views on Israel and Palestine.
Lipman, 80, said that she feared the actor had been radicalised and described his actions as “virtue-signalling”.
“I am asking for him to have the courage to face me and tell me what he thinks it is I should do, or think, or say,” she told the Times.
“I would like to reassure him that I will not be arriving with a star of David on my forehead, nor am I trying to argue him out of his point of view.
“He has to wake up and smell the grass. I have worked with actors for 60 years who often don’t share my politics. I don’t ask them, and they don’t ask me.”
She said that if McCarthy did not want to work with her, “then fair enough”. She added: “But if he won’t meet with me, then he’s a coward.
“And if he doesn’t grow up, then he’s going to limit himself to working with just Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem for the rest of his career.”
McCarthy, who has appeared in the BBC drama The Fall and the Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks, announced on Instagram that he was withdrawing from Right Before I Go at London’s Soho Theatre over his co-star’s political views.
The Northern Irish actor wrote: “Because of views she has publicly and repeatedly expressed regarding Israel and Palestine, I did not feel comfortable personally promoting her involvement. I did not ask for her casting to be reconsidered or expect anyone else to share my position. I simply chose not to use my own platform to promote someone whose political views are at odds with my own.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: McCarthy has endorsed a torrent of abuse directed at Lipman in social media posts below his announcement, including one which read: “Lipman the zio hag can get in the bin”, another calling her a “vile bigot” and “a horrid f**king witch”, and one warning “Zionists will soon have nowhere to hide”. The BeKind brigade out in force again.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Hollyoaks enough said
Don’t fret, Mossad will sort the little fairy out
Why do I get the sense the daily sceptic has lost the plot. What has happened?
Which plot? Is that a different play?
I guess there were a great many Palestinian children that would have liked to follow Lipman’s ‘advice’ too.
They wouldn’t dare to face someone and tell them what to think or do. After only having known life under Hamas’ brutal dictatorship they’d think they’d be beaten up, knee capped or wind up dead in the gutter for questioning someone.
Gerard who?
Apparently, “they” “came out” as “non-binary” in 2022.
Listen, mate, if you want to wear a dress on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and trousers the rest of the week, knock yourself out. But quit with the attention seeking, we don’t care. And I don’t care about what you stand against, either. Tell us what you do stand for.
No, thought not.
Because people sometimes applaud when performers do something it creates the delusion that their opinions matter. Actually they don’t, particularly where actors are involved, since they make their living by lying convincingly. Rather like politicians. Stick to the craft.
Good for him standing by his principles.
The Jew lobby will make the rest of his acting career difficult but he must have known the consequences.
The principle that anyone can be a prat.
I’m sure Gerard McCarthy would rather be called a “prat” by a nobody like you than be called a supporter of the genocidal Israeli government like Maureen Lipman.
They’re just bloody actors. They dress up and pretend for a living. Does that make them “somebody”?
1) How would performing in this play make him “…a supporter of the genocidal Israeli government like Maureen Lipman.”
2) Assuming you mistakenly left out a comma after ‘government’, she would no doubt say that she does not support any genocidal anybody.
3) She would also, no doubt, say that the Israeli government is not committing genocide.
4) Many people would agree with her in point 2) and 3)
5) I suspect that this is more about anti-semitism than it is about genocide.
I’m doing a Gerard McCarthy and walking out of this thread on principle as I find supporters of genocidal Israel, like you, disgusting.
MindHalfFull is a troll and a thick, bigoted one at that. Do not feed!
The standard of commentators on here has gone down hill rapidly since I subscribed with my hard earned money when it first started as Lockdown Sceptic.
Well done for dragging it down.
Ad hominem arguments are a type of logical fallacy where a person attacks the character or attributes of their opponent instead of addressing the argument itself. This approach is generally considered fallacious and is often used to divert attention from the actual issue being debated which is that Israel is an apartheid, genocidal state and the people who support it have blood on their hands.
I think McCarthy’s too full of the sense of his own importance. He also needs to realise that you don’t have to make everything in life political. I work with plenty of people who think that anyone with views to the right of the Lib Dems is beyond redemption, or that anthropogenic climate change is destroying the world, but it doesn’t stop me working with them or seeing their personal and professional qualities. If Maureen Lipman isn’t turning the play into a pro-Israel production, then what’s his problem?
Yeah if I refused to work with everyone whose political views I found distasteful then I’d be self employed, and then I’d be starving because I’d have to boycott most of my customers too, or refuse to work with supply chains because someone along the way is a rabid socialist.
I suppose he deserves credit for voting with his feet, maybe it’s a good career move for him and he’ll get employed by woke directors who admire his principles.
The difficulty that people who are essentially libertarian in nature face is that if your colleagues think you are not fully in agreement with them then they will ostracise you but worse then start accusing you of all sorts of things that the HR mob are not going to be even-handed about.
I was fairly fortunate that something of this nature didn’t lead to me leaving my employment, although subsequently I accepted voluntary redundancy because I simply couldn’t stomach any more for various reasons, but only because my manager went in to bat for me. The actual problem was that I truthfully mentioned something that happened in 1982 and someone not even born then thought that just the mention of this true life story was enough to send her (you can guess the type) into a blue funk.
I started posting anonymously around the time of the preposterous Black Lives Matter nonsense which our founder and then owner seemed to have developed an enthusiasm for. He could have sacked me – I doubt he would have done but I didn’t want to take the chance. He has exited the scene now so I am fairly safe.
It seems like a law of nature that anyone told to ‘grow up’ will not hear the message,