The Assassination of Katie Hopkins play to open at Mold's Theatr Clwyd

CONTROVERSY is set to hit Mold's Theatr Clwyd this week with the opening of a new musical The Assassination of Katie Hopkins.

Written by Chris Bush and Matt Winkworth, the production, which opens with Hopkins’s murder at a public event, has already generated plenty of column inches across the national papers before its first performance on Friday with the outspoken columnist already making her views clear on the matter.

“If you are black you are protected by your colour,” she wrote earlier this year. “If you are Muslim – by your religion... But as a straight, white, conservative I am an acceptable target, unprotected by my honesty, and fair game for physical attack.

“If my name was switched to another – a woman of colour, or a Muslim man,” she wondered, “would [it] still be acceptable and lauded by the left?”

"The show is not really about her but about what has happened to our society in a digital age, where our discourse has become anonymised and become very antagonistic," insists James Grieve, artistic director of touring theatre company Paines Plough and director of The Assassination of Katie Hopkins. "We're all basically just shouting at each other on Twitter."

With just days to go before the curtain rises, James is a busy man as he attempts to bring together the many elements of a show which reflects its contemporary setting and digital subject matter with some hi-tech staging.

"It's really exciting," he says, taking a quick break from rehearsals. "We're just at that moment when it all starts coming together. There's a lot of video projections and very complicated sound design - it's a massive show and a thrill to be part of but it's a huge challenge to build a musical from scratch - it's taken a year to get here as we try to decant it from our heads onto the stage.

"What I wasn't prepared for was how brilliantly contemporary the themes of the play would be and how wickedly satirical and hugely entertaining it would be.

"The first time I heard any of the music it was a recording of Matt singing and playing piano on his phone - he emailed me this tiny little demo and the moment I heard that I was on board. They were great melodies and it felt really exciting."

While the attention grabbing title has become its main talking point, James is determined to encourage people to see the musical as a wider discussion of where we are as a society in 2018.

"Chris is exploring how the internet is affecting us all," he says. "How our digital dependency and obsession is changing our relationships with our society, politics, celebrity, each other and ourselves.

"Why people hide behind online profiles to anonymise their opinions, what we mean by freedom of speech when so much public discourse seeks to shout opinions down, how we can possibly find truth in an era of fake news. It’s a whip sharp script, full of insight and wisdom and compassion that peers behind the headlines and social media profiles to shine a light on the individual, human stories that get overlooked in an ever more impersonal, globalised world."

First coming to notice in 2007 as a reality television contestant on The Apprentice, Hopkins later became a columnist for The Sun and the Daily Mail where her controversial views and opinions included calling for a "final solution" in the fight against Islamic terrorism and branding migrants as "cockroaches" and "feral humans".

"I passionately believe that theatre should be a place where we go to ask difficult questions," says James. "Theatre has done that for time in memoriam - if you look at the subject matter of Greek plays to Shakespeare's work at the Globe to more contemporary plays, theatre has always stood up and been unflinching about the most difficult subjects.

"For that reason I feel this is exactly the right forum to have a conversation about freedom of speech and a very divisive public figure in Katie Hopkins."

Of course a musical lives or dies on the quality of its tunes and the man entrusted with making sure that's the case is Wrexham-born Jordan Li-Smith, who despite being just 23, is already an award winning musical director and orchestrator after training at the Royal Academy Of Music.

"I moved to London four years ago and this is the first time I've been back for any length of time," he says. "It's lovely to smell that Welsh air again and be home.

"I went to the Hammond in Chester and then went to the Royal Academy in London and since then I've been solidly working as a musical director.

"The musical director works with the musical supervisor to teach the cast how to sing the songs and achieve the musicality. It's one of the few roles that sees you stick with the whole show from start to finish."

Like James, Jordan is relishing the contemporary feel of the musical both in terms of the subject matter and with the sounds he is helping create.

This is the most contemporary thing I've worked on," he laughs. "The last things I did were Ragtime and Sweet Charity and you couldn't really get more different.

"This musical has been a challenge but a welcome one and so exciting - the music is hard to describe. It's an onslaught of the senses - like a Bjork album on stage."

As for the controversial subject matter, Jordan is as enthused as James and even cheekily suggests that Hopkins should pay Theatr Clwyd a visit or at least buy the soundtrack album.

"I think it's fantastic," he adds. "The brilliant thing about this show is that it's parodying the response it's getting. It has a great sense of hindsight - it's exciting and is something that hasn't been explored before with musical theatre."

The Assassination of Katie Hopkins is at Theatr Clwyd's Emlyn Williams Theatre from Friday April 20 – Saturday May 12 2018 at 7.45pm. Saturday matinees 2.45pm (no matinee on April 21) Wednesday matinee May 2 at 2.45pm; Thursday matinee May 10 at 2.45pm. Tickets from £10. Box Office 01352 701521 / online booking (no booking fees) www.theatrclwyd.com