Hytner 'is afraid of offending Muslims'

Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, is quick to offend Christians but pulls his punches when other religions are challenged dramatically.

Nicholas Hytner, the fashionable director of the National Theatre, has been happy to offend Christians by staging shows such as Jerry Springer: The Opera, in which Christ was portrayed wearing a nappy and saying he was "a bit gay".

However, according to Simon Gray, the leading playwright, Hytner is wary of putting on anything which could upset Muslims.

"If there's going to be a play about 'inside radical Islam', it'll be a profoundly sympathetic, inquiring play, I'm sure," says the writer of such acclaimed works as Otherwise Engaged.

"I can't imagine a play that's violently opposed to Islam … you can't be publicly … and certainly not at the National Theatre." Graydescribes Hytner's "fearlessness in attacking Christianity" as "a very easy sort of liberalism that allows [only] yourself, so to speak, to be beaten up".

He criticises the director for failing to stage Behzti, a sexual comedy which sparked protests by Sikhs when it was staged in Birmingham.

"It seems to me that you should say that the reason we didn't bring that play was because we didn't want to be bombed," he says in Standpoint magazine. "I don't think you should be proud of putting on Jerry Springer."

The National, he adds for good measure, is "run by a Left-wing orthodoxy".