Laura Kay Bailey was cast as J.K. Rowling in an Edinburgh Fringe play and found herself at the center of an international row. Her answer was to write a comedy about it, and Rowling In It: Villain in Progress now comes from London to Asylum NYC for a strictly limited run, December 18–23, 2026.
The play was TERF, staged at the Assembly Rooms during the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and Bailey played Rowling as a working actor few people had heard of. Within weeks The Times had profiled her, and Sky News was reporting on threats and online abuse aimed at the production. By her own account, she had walked into the middle of the debate without quite meaning to.
Her solo show turns that summer into backstage satire. Bailey wrote it and performs it alone, retracing how the part came to her and what happened once the job became a news story, with aim taken at Rowling herself and at performative activism inside the theater industry. It does not ask the audience to take a side; its subjects are ambition, getting things wrong, being misunderstood and learning to live with being disliked.
“I thought I’d landed an acting job. Instead I blindly stumbled into the middle of an international controversy. At a certain point, the only sensible response was to write a comedy about it,” Bailey said.
Dominic Shaw, associate director of The Devil Wears Prada in the West End, directs, with dramaturgy by Jordan S. Daniel. PJ McEvoy designs the video and Mark Fenton the sound, and Nina Morgen created the original London lighting design.
LKB Productions presents the New York engagement, produced by Hannah Elsy Productions. For Hannah Elsy, a co-producer of The Ask at Theatre 555, it is a second show about how fans have reckoned with the Harry Potter author, after Dumbledore Is So Gay. “This comedy does not tell you what to think about J.K. Rowling, it’s a dissection of Laura’s journey to playing her,” she said.
The London run at the King’s Head Theatre earned four-star reviews from Theatre and Tonic, All That Dazzles, ReviewsGate and A Shiny Life For Me. The Spectator praised Bailey’s “fantastic array of comic impersonations,” and the Daily Mail called it “a funny and engaging one-woman show.”
Rowling In It: Villain in Progress runs December 18–23, 2026, at Asylum NYC, 123 East 24th Street. Tickets are on sale through Asylum NYC.
