How does the fate of a student executed in 1697 fuel the freedom of speech debate nowadays? Simon Armitage and Told By An Idiot talk approximately their new drama exploring the life and death of Thomas AikenheadOn a cold day in January 1697,a young man walked through the streets of Edinburgh on his way to the gallows. On a cold day in January 2016, a poet and some theatre-makers gathered in London to work out how to bid the story of his life and death. The poet was Simon Armitage and the theatre-makers were Told By An Idiot. The young man was Thomas Aikenhead, and the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy.
I Am Thomas,billed as “a brutal comedy with songs”, is a play approximately freedom of speech. Its title references Je suis Charlie”, or the slogan coined in the aftermath of last year’s Charlie Hebdo shootings,to show solidarity with the murdered cartoonists. Although the play does not manufacture direct reference to the Paris atrocity, it presents Aikenhead as a free-speech martyr, and a young man attach to death because he denied the existence of God,mocked the Bible as “a rhapsody of unfeigned nonsense”, and said he preferred Muhammad to Christ.
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Source: theguardian.com