by CONTENT WARNING: This column may contain opinions with which you strongly disagree as well as well-known activists slipping into the breach and, possibly, unrestrained or fury below the line.
So here we are again: the trigger warning debate has become so ongoing and volatile that the discussion might need its own trigger warning these days (as above). Is the act of alerting an audience to sensitive, potentially provocative material such as sex, violence and suicide (and that’s only in Romeo and Juliet) an aid to access or is it infantilizing us and neutralizing the power of the theater?
Ian McKellen has given his verdict against such (“sarcastic”) warnings. Ralph Fiennes also spoke of the prerogative of the theater to disturb and disturb without them. Now Matt Smith admits that, of course, streak lighting and other effects should be mentioned in advance to those with medical conditions, but anything else undermines the wonder and danger of live drama.
In theory, trigger warnings are inconspicuous and easy to ignore. They are now common protocol for many theaters, posted in programs, on websites and on auditorium doors. They are barely emitted by PA systems – so why the outrage and scorn in some circles?
Because it is clear that the subject is co-opted into the culture wars and become a symbol of greater division. Those who support them are damned as “woke” and “snowskin”. The people they wanted to destroy are establishment dinosaurs. “We didn’t have them in my day,” Fiennes repeated, naming himself in the latter category. He and Smith have been misled by the other camp for using their reputations to rehash this issue rather than more pressing issues in the arts, such as funding cuts, post-pandemic hardship and exorbitant ticket prices.
But if we move beyond the Punch and Judy politics of the debate, Smith’s argument that prompts warnings about the purpose of theater – to surprise, frighten, and perhaps even “encourage” us – has serious implications. : “I worry sometimes that we are. moving towards a sanitized version of everything and we’re taking the risk, the invention and the ingenuity out of everything,” he says.
Theater needs to shake us completely out of our rut. In fact, it is his duty to encourage, capture, needle and push at the limits, in my opinion. The best play, in my opinion, is one that lands in your brain, ruffles feathers, and refuses to be shrugged after curtain call. This kind of challenging drama seems more important than ever.
The greatest 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 subjects range from torture to cannibalism, or Martin McDonagh, whose plays are full of eye-catching violence, could argue that they write the ugly plays they do to to wake us up. Should their work containing warning material? And if it does, will it be more anodyne, or safe?
Of course not. It implies that it may combine content warnings with the content itself. There is no change in the play if there is a warning in the program or in the lobby. There will still be bloodshed 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 enables some people to go blindfolded, as it were.
So the real question is whether trigger warnings could help some of us prepare ourselves for that shock and arousal. Surely we are all entitled to engage in theater on terms we feel comfortable with. If warnings serve some of us well, they do no harm to the rest. We live in a time where the harmful taboos surrounding issues like mental health no longer exist, as well as heightened sensitivities to difference overall, and this is a manifestation of trigger warnings. None of it is a threat to the “subject” on stage, or an attempt to sanitize it.
All they do is help us decide if we want to watch a drama about depression if we’re suffering from it, or about misogyny when we spent the last month using it at work, or that a show uses quartz and flashing lights. we are epileptic. Is this really what we are choosing to end our culture war?
Related: An Enemy of the People review – Matt Smith’s brand of grim fire is turning from rebel to conspirator
What trigger warnings can’t do, I think, is protect us from feeling disturbed, disturbed, or any other extreme emotion, inside the auditorium. Nor do I think we want to avoid such feelings in the theater, even if we welcome the advance warning. Drama is based on conflict, and it provides us with a safety valve for all the difficult emotions in life, within the safe confines of a dark room, the suspension of disbelief as actors act out fiction in front of us.
The plays that have troubled me the most over the past few years either don’t relate to my experience, or they don’t contain themes that I “think” will inspire me. One such harrowing show, Rewind, on stage this month at London’s New Diorama Theatre, dealt with human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes in South America, and used music and puppetry to tell its story of a loving mother. and her daughter’s remains were found in a large grave.
I was in bits after watching it. Even if I had heeded the trigger warnings, I could not have predicted the strength of my emotional reaction. I was drawn into the world of the play, an empathy that left the boundary between my own experience and the experience of the characters on stage, which made it exciting, dangerous, 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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