“Contains prolonged blackout, themes of ableism, addiction, blood, death, mental illness, transphobia and strong language.” Just another school night in some parts of Edinburgh; but in the city’s more refined quarters, the sort of evening which now comes with a trigger warning. For August is festival time in the capital, and the streets throng with intrepid performers, apparently intent on pushing quaking nervous systems to their limits.
This particular dire warning accompanies a fringe production on stage at the Traverse theatre, exploring what happened when a young Australian with an autoimmune disorder started taking cross-sex hormones. Thoughtfully, the performer will also provide a “relaxed” and “low-sensory” version of the work upon request. But if that all sounds a bit too much — or indeed, not quite enough for especially hardened souls — then what about the play at the same venue which comes with an audience self-care pack, listing suicide helplines for those affected? Or — for a real flash of cold fear down your back — what about a night out with “themes of discrimination or hateful language… strong language/swearing, distressing scenes, references to death and some audience interaction”? Oh please God, no — never audience interaction.
It’s not just experimental dramas that now come bristling with disclaimers; more canonical productions are taking a risk-averse approach too. Famously, Chekhov told aspiring playwrights that if they decided to hang a rifle on a wall during the first act, it should have been fired by the end of the story. Viewers of the forthcoming star-studded production of The Seagull are spared any remaining suspense in this regard: the ticket site advises that there will be “gunshot sounds and references to suicide”. At Glyndebourne this season, The Marriage of Figaro came with the information that “at several points, characters of lesser status are subject to unwanted sexual advances and physically aggressive behaviour” — almost as if Beaumarchais’s mordant class satire was just a regrettably outdated accompaniment to some nice singing.
As Wittgenstein might have asked: what is this language game of trigger warnings, and what is it really doing? The philosopher told us not to take words at face value, but to look and see how they are actually being used. An early point to note is that, in fact, the fashion is now for “content warnings”, not “trigger warnings”. One can only assume that this is to stop people being triggered by the word “trigger”, with its grim intimations of gun-based violence. At the moment, the sinisterly foreboding “warning” survives unscathed; but it is surely only a matter of time before it too is replaced with something more relaxed and low sensory.
At first glance, the lists of potential menaces on theatre websites can seem confusing, mixing up different kinds of threat. Is the audience supposed to be protected from a kind of mental health hazard like a bang or a shock, potentially producing unwilled trauma responses in an overactive amygdala? Or is it more a question of guarding against moral hazards: problematic behaviours the spectator might unwittingly emulate, unless sternly warned off first? The very 21st-century answer is that, of course, it is both. For the main, perhaps even the only, justification for declaring something a moral hazard these days — transphobia, power imbalances, hateful language, or whatever — is that it was a mental health hazard to some vulnerable people first.
But let’s be honest: it can’t really be about harm-reduction, can it? For nobody seriously believes that the theatre can be quite that exciting. In my youth, plays were relatively boring things that parents or teachers made you sit through once a year, when what you really wanted to do was go to the cinema. The idea that you might be scarred for life by some unnaturally loud proclaiming, the odd bit of dramatic writhing around, and some judiciously applied lighting and props would have been ludicrous — as it is surely all the more so to generations raised on Netflix gorefests. And here the exception proves the rule: surely not every young dramatist can be the new Sarah Kane. If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form, by encouraging the idea that spectators might feel something visceral. (“Depending on your lived experiences, this performance may trigger memories of loss, grief, or bullying,” speculates another festival event, rather hopefully.)
The official explanation given for such notices is that they allow people to emotionally prepare for what is to come, the way you might steel yourself just before abseiling down a cliff or jumping out of a plane. But since you are not in fact going to be doing anything death-defying, but rather sitting in a cramped seat for a couple of hours casting surreptitious glances at your watch, it is possible that dire forecasts of impending emotional assault set some people up for anxiety where there would not otherwise have been any. And that, fairly predictably, is what several studies have found: trigger warnings have a tendency to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Staying true to the ethos of the project, this awkward fact would seem to require that such warnings be given separate, prior trigger warnings of their own — and so on ad infinitum — rendering the whole process unmanageable for harried producers.
“If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form.”
Further evidence that content warnings are basically fake news is that the theatre-makers who use them go ahead with their shows enthusiastically anyway. If the concern about the potential for serious harm to audiences was genuine, then, being ostentatiously high-minded and responsible people, they surely would not proceed at all. Superficially, you might assume trigger warnings are a bit like medico-legal disclaimers for pharmaceutical products: they list possible side effects, and thereby empower autonomous agents to decide whether to take the risk or not, getting artists off the moral hook. But — to put it bluntly — pharmaceutical products save lives, a fact which can offset damaging side-effects. Dramatic productions, despite the traditional thespian gush, do not. I’ve been to some highly enjoyable productions in my time, but none of them were worth sustaining serious psychological injury afterwards.
So when makers plough ahead with a supposedly dangerous play, the obvious implication is that they don’t really believe their work might wreak lasting emotional havoc after all. And in this suspicion, they are surely correct; for, as many a philosopher of art has noticed before them, even highly aroused emotional responses to fictions are not like their counterpart responses to real life.
The most obvious difference is that, as already noted, the theatre is not as intense. Even in the depths of imaginative engagement, an easily-accessed part of your mind knows that what you are watching isn’t really happening right now. It’s for that reason you can eat sweets while watching someone being murdered on stage, which otherwise might seem a bit callous; or wipe away the tears as you leave the theatre, and start thinking about dinner instead. Admittedly, the best productions engage viewers much more deeply than this; but even when they do, audience responses are self-controlled in a way that emotional reactions to parallel real-life situations would not be.
A related difference is that emotional responses to theatre — and, incidentally, to even the scariest film thriller — are often enjoyable in a way that raw emotion in the wild is not. Aristotle noted this strange fact about tragedy, despite all the accompanying pity and fear. Centuries later, David Hume vividly described the “unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy”. Why this should be, exactly, is up for debate; but I like the Aristotelian idea that, in engaging with dramatic art, you are “purifying” or “refining” your otherwise untutored emotional responses in a controlled imaginative environment — which is one gloss on his famously vague idea of catharsis. And the process of emotional refinement is deeply enjoyable because it involves valuable self-mastery, even if at the same time it feels somewhat disturbing, scary, or sad.
But if that is roughly right, then all of the traditional aspects of the spectator’s experience are still crucial for the process, without trigger warnings getting in the way. You have to display willingness to tolerate anxiety; to experience the shock of the gun going off, or the discomfort of a violent argument, or the sudden nihilistic horror of a suicide on stage. In a nutshell, you have to stop acting like a massive toddler, treating a play like it’s a balloon that might pop unexpectedly and make you cry. You have to power down your amygdala, and get your pre-frontal cortex deep into the narrative, so you can become intrigued, blindsided, disconcerted or enlightened by human complexity, and so learn new things, both about the world and about yourself. And you can’t do any of that properly if you already superstitiously read a priggish synopsis when you bought your ticket, trying to shore up your mind against artistic ambush later on.
