CONTENT WARNING: This column may include opinions with which you forcefully disagree along with big name actors wading into the breach and, quite possibly, unrestrained below-the-line rage or rebuttal.
So we’re back here again: the debate on trigger warnings has become so persistent and volatile that the discussion might require its own trigger warning these days (as per above). Is the act of alerting an audience to sensitive, potentially triggering, content such as sex, violence and suicide (and that’s just in Romeo and Juliet) a helpful access aid or it is infantilising us and neutering the power of theatre?
Ian McKellen has delivered his verdict against such warnings (“ludicrous”). Ralph Fiennes too has spoken of theatre’s prerogative to shock and disturb without them. Now Matt Smith acknowledges that, of course, strobe lighting and other effects should be mentioned beforehand for those with medical conditions, but anything beyond this undermines the inherent surprise and danger of live drama.
In theory, trigger warnings are unobtrusive and can easily be ignored. They are common protocol for many theatres now, placed in programmes, on websites and on the doors of auditoriums. They are hardly shouted out from PA systems – so why the outrage and offence in some circles?
Because it is clear the subject has been co-opted into the culture wars and become symbolic of bigger division. Those who endorse them are damned as being “woke” and “snowflakey”. Those who wanted them scrapped are establishment dinosaurs. “We didn’t have them in my day,” was a sentiment repeated by Fiennes, thereby designating himself in the latter category. Both he and Smith have been damned by the opposite camp for using their fame to rail again on this non-topic rather than more urgent issues in the arts, such as funding cuts, post-pandemic hardships and extortionate ticket prices.
But if we move past the Punch and Judy politics of the debate, Smith’s argument that trigger warnings undercut the purpose of theatre – to surprise, alarm, and maybe even “trigger” us – has serious connotations: “I worry sometimes that we’re moving towards a sort of sanitised version of everything and we’re stripping the danger and the invention and the ingenuity out of everything,” he says.
Theatre must absolutely shake us out of our complacency. In fact, it has a duty to provoke, arrest, needle and push at the boundaries, in my view. The best play, for me, is one that burrows down in your brain, that ruffles the feathers, refusing to be shrugged away after curtain call. This kind of challenging drama seems more important than ever.
The best playwrights have used drama to explore the dark side of the human condition, from Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett. Their work is not comfortable to watch. Writers such as Sarah Kane, whose subject matter ranges from mutilation to cannibalism, or Martin McDonagh, whose plays are filled with eye-watering violence, might argue that they write the grisly dramas they do to jolt us awake. Should their work contain a content warning? And if it does, will it become more anodyne, or safe?
Of course not. To suggest that it might is to conflate content warnings with content itself. Nothing has changed in the play if there is a warning for it in the programme or foyer. There will still be a bloodbath at the end of Hamlet; the rape and suicide remain in Blasted. Gloucester will have his eyes gouged out in King Lear. The trigger warning just enables some people to go in open-eyed, as it were.
So the real question is whether trigger warnings could help some of us prepare ourselves for that shock and provocation. Surely we are all entitled to engage with theatre on terms with which we feel comfortable. If a warning serves some of us well, then they are doing no harm to the rest. We live in a time when there are no longer the harmful taboos around issues such as mental health, as well as keener sensitivities to difference on the whole, and trigger warnings are a reflection of that. None of it is a threat to the “content” on stage, or an attempt to sanitise it.
All they do is help us decide if we are up for seeing a play about depression if we are a sufferer of it, or about misogyny when we have spent the past month experiencing it at work, or that a show uses haze and flashing lights when we are epileptic. Is this really what we are choosing to have our culture war over?
What trigger warnings can’t do, in my view, is protect us from feeling shocked, distressed, or any other unexpectedly extreme emotion, inside the auditorium. Nor do I think we necessarily want to avoid such emotions at the theatre, even if we welcome the warning beforehand. Drama is built on conflict, and it offers us a safety valve for all the difficult emotions in life, within the safe bounds of a darkened room, our suspension of disbelief and actors performing a fiction before us.
The dramas I have been most distressed by in recent times do not relate to my experience, or contain themes that I “think” I will be triggered by. One such shattering show, Rewind, staged this month at the New Diorama theatre in London, was about human rights violations committed by authoritarian regimes in South America, and used music and puppetry to tell its story about a grieving mother and her disappeared daughter, whose remains were retrieved in a mass grave.
I was in bits after watching it. Even if I had taken heed of the trigger warnings, I could not have predicted the strength of my emotional reaction. I was pulled into the world of the play, empathy blurring the boundary between my experience and that of the characters on stage, and that made it thrillingly, dangerously, moving. This is what all good theatre does, with or without a warning.
Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theatre critic
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