Trigger warnings are not the problem. The conversation around them is.
Something odd is happening at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Plus: the reviews of Unicorn, a tough chat with Brian Cox, and the stigmatisation of solo theatregoing. All in this week's Shouts and Murmurs.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Several incidents occurred recently that have reignited the discourse around audience behaviour and - yes, sorry - trigger warnings.
Peter Kay ejected two hecklers in fairly amusing circumstances at Manchester’s AO Arena. Someone shouted homophobic abuse during the Dolly Parton musical Here You Come Again at Manchester Opera House in a worrying sign of the world to come. And people just will not stop fainting during the West End run of Eline Arbo’s sublime adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, despite prominent warnings about its content, in a situation that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with Manchester.
All this has, predictably, resulted in a lot of words. The Telegraph’s Ben Lawrence has had a crisis of patriotism, for which I can think of several better justifications than someone going on their phone in the cinema. The Stage’s Alistair Smith has rightly praised the resilience of actors forced to pause performances due to interruptions. Most interestingly, though, in The Observer, Kate Maltby has queried the efficacy of trigger warnings, given that they are posted everywhere in the Harold Pinter Theatre but people keep fainting. Worse than that, Maltby argues, these warnings have served to sensationalise a show that is far richer than some of the headlines it has prompted:
“The Years deserves to be recognised as a rare achievement: a hit drama that captures a lifetime of female experiences. Instead, to casual observers, it has become ‘the abortion play’.”
I really agree with that last point. It would be a travesty if The Years became known as “the play with the abortion scene that makes people faint” instead of “the play that transcendentally stages the last seventy years of feminist thought, social change, and international politics.” I also think that touches on what the real issue here is, though: it is not trigger warnings that are the problem, but the conversation around them.
Trigger warnings have become embroiled in the right-wing media’s relentless culture war on “woke” in the last few years, a culture war that has recently found expression politically in the tearing up of DEI initiatives across the Atlantic, and perhaps in the mouths of audience members at Here You Come Again in Manchester, too. Fuelled by facile journalists that should have far better things to do, trigger warnings have become a flashpoint for arguments over inclusivity, generational difference, cultural sensitivity, and more. And, under that pressure, their true application - to prevent people from experiencing extreme distress - is being warped beyond utility.
If this was a sane world, there would be no stigma attached to trigger warnings. People of any political persuasion would feel free to understand their emotions, articulate their concerns, check to see if a show contained them, and act accordingly. Maybe they could close their eyes during the difficult bit. Maybe they could tough it out. Maybe they could attend a relaxed performance, during which they could discreetly leave for a few minutes or do anything that made them feel okay. Whatever.
Instead, though, we have an unnecessary situation in which swathes of the population believe a total myth that some people cannot cope with any difficult topics or graphic content at all, that appreciating your own genuine triggers is ‘woke’, and that consulting a warning to negotiate them somehow makes you weak. And that unhelpful context not only makes it hard for people that do use trigger warnings to do so unselfconsciously, it also probably means that people who should use trigger warnings end up not using them out of some twisted sense of superiority.
Because, clearly, something odd is happening at The Years. Trigger warnings are very present, yet people keep fainting. This, I think, probably has something to do with the fact that we are simply not used to graphic descriptions of abortion, just as we are not used to frank representations of female aging and female sexuality: would as many people faint if Romola Garai got murdered on stage instead? I don’t think so!
I also think, though, that it has something to do with those trigger warnings being ignored by people that should not be ignoring them. A lot has been said about the demographics of the audience members’ fainting at The Years, and particularly about the fact that a lot of them seem to be older men. Hmm, older men in a West End audience? Could it be that some of the people fainting during performances of The Years are the ones who thought trigger warnings were beneath them?
That might seem a stretch but I don’t say it without anecdotal evidence. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Anjli Mohindra, one of the five phenomenal actors in The Years, for The Stage. She told me about an incident when the show was at the Almeida Theatre.
“The most vocal reaction was when a man stood up and said that it was disgusting that we hadn’t warned anyone about that scene. What was incredible was that the entire audience turned round and said: ‘They did.’”
In her article, Maltby ponders a 2023 study that suggests “viewing a trigger warning appears to increase anticipatory anxiety prior to viewing content.” Maltby uses that phenomenon to explain the ongoing situation at The Years, arguing that the presence of trigger warnings at the Harold Pinter Theatre induces a tension among audience members that paradoxically makes it more likely that they faint than less. I think that is probably true, but I wouldn’t immediately blame that on the concept of trigger warnings per se, and suggest that we should get rid of them. That does not account for the numerous incidents that the trigger warnings presumably prevented, right?
Rather, I am inclined to ask why the presence of trigger warnings apparently engenders such stress and anger among audiences, and what we could do to ease that. And I think a good start would be steering away from incendiary arguments about them and away from hyperbolic articles that reduce incredible shows to clickbait headlines, and towards a reasonable conversation about the genuine hurdles in their application, one that avoids name-calling and centres compassion and understanding.
And, in that spirit, I would sincerely request that we make sure The Years goes down in history not as the show that made a few people faint and got everyone worked up about trigger warnings again, but as the towering theatrical achievement that it is.
In other news: The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama is the latest conservatoire in trouble; a new play about Brian Epstein and a new musical about the Pendle Witch Trials are part of Kiln’s 2025/26 season; the Why Am I So Single? post-mortem continues; Mark Ravenhill has written ten new plays; Chichester Festival Theatre will stage Irving Berlin’s Top Hat and Hamlet with Giles Terera and some other shows; Perth Theatre is aiming to return to “full capacity as a producing house” thanks to extra cash from Creative Scotland; but Cumbernauld Theatre is fighting for survival after having its funding cut; book tickets for this show opening in 2036.