Pre-performance trigger warnings for violence, risqué language, loud noises, the 1970s, cancer, “weapons, including knives”, “theatrical fog”, and even “distressing scenes of music, family and romance”, among other things, have become a commonplace fixture of modern theatre.
Those on the woke, safetyist left often claim that trigger warnings allow people to make informed choices about what they see or read. Others say that the power of art to agitate, challenge and provoke is integral to its value, and that trigger warnings imperil freedom of expression while instilling a fear of the unfamiliar in an audience’s mind.
Matt Smith, the star of historical drama The Crown, this week reaffirmed his membership of the latter camp, alongside a small but distinguished group of fellow thespians, including Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Ralph Fiennes and Simon Callow.
In an interview with The Times, the former Doctor Who actor doubled down on comments he made earlier this year, that theatre “doesn’t need trigger warnings” because the very point of art is that it is “meant to be dangerous”.
Asked whether he wanted to play polarising people, he replied: “100 per cent! That’s the f***ing point. We should be telling morally difficult stories, nowadays in particular. It’s OK to feel uncomfortable or provoked while looking at a painting or watching a play, but I worry everything’s being dialled and dumbed down. We’re telling audiences they’re going to be scared before they’ve watched something.
“Isn’t being shocked, surprised, stirred the point?” Smith continued. “Too much policing of stories and being afraid to bring them out because a climate is a certain way is a shame. I’m not sure I’m on board with trigger warnings.”
Matt Smith’s comments about the seemingly inexorable de-risking of the arts came after Dame Judi Dench told theatregoers that they shouldn’t go to plays if they are “that sensitive”, and expressed concern about increased used of trigger warnings before productions.
Dench, whose long list of stage and film credits includes Lady Macbeth, was uncomfortable that audiences are routinely warned about potentially distressing content, including abuse, violence and loud noises.
“Do they do that?” Dench asked. “It must be a pretty long trigger warning before King Lear or Titus Andronicus. I can see why they exist, but if you’re that sensitive, don’t go to the theatre, because you could be very shocked. Where is the surprise of seeing and understanding it in your own way?”
Ralph Fiennes also recently criticised the use of trigger warnings.
The actor, who is renowned for his roles in Schindler’s List, The English Patient and the Harry Potter film franchise, and recently starred in an immersive touring production of Macbeth alongside Indira Varma, said the aspect of surprise is “what makes theatre so exciting”.
Speaking on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show in February, he was asked if attendees had gone too “soft”.
“I think audiences have,” he replied. “We didn’t used to have trigger warnings. There are very disturbing scenes in Macbeth, terrible murders and things, but I think the impact of theatre is that you should be shocked, and you should be disturbed. I don’t think you should be prepared for these things and when I was young, we never had trigger warnings before a show.”
“Theatre needs to be alive and in the present. It’s the shock, it’s the unexpected, that’s what makes an actor in theatre so exciting,” he added.
Last year, Sir Ian McKellen criticised as “ludicrous” trigger warnings for his play Frank and Percy, which is about two retired men who meet on Hampstead Heath. Audiences at The Other Palace in London were told to beware “strong language, sexual references, and discussions of bereavement and cancer”.
The actor Simon Callow also called for an end to the practice, after it emerged that Chichester Festival theatre had issued a warning about the “distressing” themes of “music; family; romance; the threat of Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria” included in its production of kitsch family favourite, The Sound of Music.
Warnings of this kind, he said, demonstrated “a fundamental failure to grasp what the theatre is: not a model for behaviour but a crucible in which we look at what it is to be human”. The theatre is “not a pulpit, but a gymnasium of the imagination,” he added.
Sadly, examples of this “fundamental failure” abound.
Earlier this year, a play about Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother was given a trigger warning at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, because it is set in the 1970s, “and consequently reflects some of the attitudes, language, and conventions of the time”.
Shakespeare’s Globe in London also recently issued “content guidance” for its production of Antony and Cleopatra to warn audiences of “depictions of suicide, scenes of violence and war and misogynoir references”. (Misogynoir is apparently a portmanteau term for discrimination against women and black people.)
Last November, a production of Macbeth featuring David Tennant included a quasi-medical trigger warning for those who might be suffering from postnatal depression. “This production explores psychosis and contains suggestions of post-combat and postnatal mental health concerns,” the content note cautioned, before adding: “On stage there is blood, scenes of violence and depictions of death.”
Executives of London’s Globe Theatre received heavy criticism back in 2022 after warning ticket holders that a performance of Julius Caesar contained “depictions of war, self-harm and suicide, stage blood and weapons including knives”.
A repeat offender, the Globe Theatre also prompted controversy when it began issuing trigger warnings for trauma survivors, and sharing the Samaritans’ helpline number before performances of Romeo and Juliet.
As to whether trigger warnings deliver the benefits their advocates claim for them, there is now a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests they are often either useless or harmful in ways not intended.
One recent study by a team of psychologists at Harvard University “found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD”.
There was, however, “substantial evidence that trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors’ views of their trauma as central to their identity”.
If this dynamic holds true in other contexts, it follows that trigger warnings might not be helping ‘vulnerable’ populations to cope, but actually contributing to the pathologisation of their experience of everyday life in a pluralist society, iatrogenically reinforcing the importance of avoiding intellectual transgression, eccentricity and risk-taking in a way that ends up perpetuating their ‘vulnerability’.
In fact, a more recent large-scale meta-analysis carried out by Australian academics did conclude that in many instances trigger warnings exacerbate people’s underlying anxiety.
Citing multiple studies that “experimentally tested emotional reactions in the anticipatory period after giving a warning but prior to exposure to the warned-about content”, the researchers wrote: “This literature consistently demonstrates that viewing a trigger warning appears to increase anticipatory anxiety prior to viewing content.”
Their conclusion? “Trigger warnings are unhelpful for trauma survivors, college students, trauma-naïve individuals, and mixed groups of participants.”
