CONTENT WARNING: This column may feature views with which you strongly disagree, as well as major actors intruding and possibly unbridled, off-the-cuff outrage or rebuttals.
So we’re back here: The debate about trigger warnings has become so persistent and volatile that these days the debate may require its own trigger warning (like the one above). Is warning audiences about sensitive, potentially triggering content like sex, violence, and suicide (and this only applies to Romeo and Juliet) a useful outreach tool, or does it infantilize us and neutralize the power of theatre?
Ian McKellen has ruled against such warnings (“ridiculous”). Ralph Fiennes also spoke of theater’s privilege to shock and disturb without them. Of course, Matt Smith admits that strobe lighting and other effects need to be mentioned beforehand for those with medical issues, but anything beyond that undermines the inherent surprise and danger of live drama.
In theory, trigger warnings are unobtrusive and can be easily ignored. These are now common protocols of many theaters; are placed in programs, websites and on auditorium doors. There is almost no sound coming from KA systems to these; So why the anger and resentment in some circles?
Because it is clear that the issue has been used as a tool for culture wars and has become a symbol of a larger division. Those who support them are condemned as “woke” and “snowflakes”. It’s the resident dinosaurs who want these scrapped. Fiennes identified himself in the latter category, repeating the phrase “We didn’t have those in my day.” Both he and Smith have been condemned by the opposing camp for using their fame again on this extraneous issue rather than on more pressing issues in the arts, such as funding cuts, post-pandemic challenges, and exorbitant ticket prices.
But moving past the Punch and Judy politics of the debate, Smith’s argument that trigger warnings—to surprise, alarm, and perhaps even “trigger” us—undermines the purpose of theater has serious connotations: “Sometimes we worry that we’re moving towards a sort of sanitized version of everything and everything “We eliminate danger, invention and creativity,” he says.
Theater must definitely save us from this complacency. In fact, in my opinion, he has a duty to provoke, arrest, pin, and push the limits. For me, the best play is the one that gets deep into your brain, gives you goosebumps, refuses to shrug after the curtain closes. This kind of compelling drama seems more important than ever.
From Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, the best playwrights have used drama to explore the darker side of the human condition. It is not comfortable to watch them work. Writers like Sarah Kane, whose plots range from mutilation to cannibalism, or Martin McDonagh, whose plays feature tear-jerking violence, might claim to write grisly dramas to wake us up. Should they Does the work contain a content warning? And if so, will it be calmer or safer?
Of course not. To suggest that this might happen is to conflate content warnings with the content itself. If there is a warning about this in the program or in the foyer, nothing changes in the game. There will still be a bloodbath at the end of Hamlet; Rape and suicide remain in Blasted. Gloucester’s eyes will be gouged out in King Lear. The trigger warning allows some people to literally walk in with their eyes open.
So the question is whether trigger warnings can help some of us prepare ourselves for this shock and provocation. Of course, we all have the right to engage in theater under the conditions we feel comfortable with. If a warning helps some of us, it does no harm to the rest of us. We live in a time where harmful taboos around topics like mental health no longer exist, and there are sharper sensitivities to differences in general, and trigger warnings are a reflection of that. None of this is a threat to the “content” on stage or an attempt to sanitize it.
All they do is help us decide if we’re suffering from depression, or if we’re talking about the misogyny we’ve spent the past month experiencing at work, or if we’re ready to see a play that uses fog and flashing lights at a show. We have epilepsy. Is this really how we choose to end our culture war?
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What trigger warnings cannot do, in my view, is protect us from shock, distress, or other unexpected extreme emotions in the room. Nor do I think we necessarily want to avoid such feelings in theatre, even if we welcome forewarning. Drama is built on conflict and offers us a safety valve for all the difficult emotions in life, within the safe confines of a dark room, where we must suspend our disbelief and watch actors play out a fiction before us.
The TV series I’ve had the most trouble with lately are not about my experiences, they don’t contain themes that I “think” will trigger. One such shocking show, Rewind, performed at London’s New Diorama theater this month, dealt with human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes in South America and used music and puppetry to tell the story of a grieving mother and her missing daughter. their remains were exhumed from the mass grave.
After watching it, I was shattered. Even if I had heeded the trigger warnings, I could not have predicted the strength of my emotional response. I was drawn into the world of the play, empathy blurred the boundary between my experience and that of the characters on stage, making the play exciting, dangerous and moving. This is what all good theater does, with or without warning.
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Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theater critic
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