Theatre for snowflakes: the creep of trigger warnings
Trigger warnings are being slapped on everything from dead moths to shirtless men, amid fears audience members could take offence. Eminent theatre figures have had enough.
Andrew Bovell recently went to a play that included a content warning about nudity. The AWGIE-award winning playwright and screenwriter, acknowledges “the use of nudity in theatre has always been hotly debated’’: in some cases, it can be seen as “gratuitous and voyeuristic” and in others, as “an opportunity to observe the human form in all its variations’’.
However, the Lantana screenwriter was startled to find the nudity in the play he saw did not involve a naked body – only “a male actor removing his shirt. I wondered why anyone thought we needed to be warned about that.’’ Bovell does not name the production, but says its content warning “felt unnecessary and prudish, particularly given the amount of nudity we can access online’’.
The creator of celebrated plays including The Secret River, Speaking in Tongues and After Dinner warns: “If theatre becomes prudish, we are in trouble.’’
Bovell is far from alone in sounding a warning about well, trigger warnings. In an escalating trend, theatre companies in Australia and overseas are slapping alerts on plays about a seemingly infinite range of subjects they fear may offend or alienate audience members. Many, if not most, of these so-called triggers would have passed without comment just a few years ago.
A survey by Review shows that in 2024, leading Australian theatre companies have issued content warnings about everything from dead crayfish and a fake dead moth to common illnesses, letters to an agony aunt, references to a child biting an adult and the famously spurned suitor from My Brilliant Career telling the heroine, Sybylla, she is “well-shaped”.
For its production Meet Me at Dawn (staged in February and March), the Melbourne Theatre Company issued warnings over a character dry-retching and an artificial moth that is seen on stage. The play is a two-hander about lovers shipwrecked on an island, and the MTC website states: “A dead moth is tangled on the clothes of one of the characters … This is a fake moth. No animals are harmed during the making of the production.’’
The MTC’s keenly anticipated musical adaptation of Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel My Brilliant Career, opens in November, and ticket buyers are being warned about “a brief description of a bull and a cow mating’’ and “a brief reference to the death of sick cows’’ – as many readers will know, Franklin’s beloved novel is set in rural Australia.
Under the subheading “sexual references”, theatre fans are cautioned that romantic hero Hal, played by Sam Neill in the movie, “tells (lead character) Sybylla that she is ‘well shaped’, grabs her by the waist and asks for a kiss.’’ Quick, pass the smelling salts!
The MTC website also advises that in this adaptation by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant, “Sybylla and other characters refer to death several times throughout the play as a figure of speech or flippant remark’’. Audiences are further counselled that Sybylla – memorably portrayed by a wilful, wild-haired Judy Davis in the film – “describes being stuck on the farm as enslavement’’.
Easily triggered theatregoers are also being catered to by Perth’s Black Swan Theatre Company. Its website says the recently staged Steven Rodgers play, The Pool, about characters who visit an aquatic centre, contains “fat shaming (mild) when a character speaks of dealing with self-confidence issues to do with their body in a swimsuit’’. So talking about your own insecurities is now seen as fat shaming?
The flagship company provides a content warning for all of its 2024 plays including Kate Mulvany’s The Seed, which will be unveiled in November. Under the heading “animal abuse”, patrons are warned that in this family saga, the “death of crayfish and other sea creatures (are) mentioned in passages about cray fishing’’. The warning also describes a bloody attempt to bury a dead dog at sea.
Tickets go on sale this month for Black Swan’s production of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, a play set in a radiation-poisoned dystopia. Extending its animal welfare warnings, Black Swan says this British play includes mentions of “cats wandering into a nuclear fallout zone’’ and of “cows in nuclear affected radiation fields having all died’’.
Critics say an increasingly zealous approach to trigger warnings reflects the rise of a “ludicrous” and “wildly over-managed” culture among theatre managements, along with exaggerated anxieties about the legal repercussions of even mildly contentious material. Other factors are fears of social media pile-ons and the migration of the “snowflake” generation’s values – such as the demand that theatres be “safe spaces” – from right-on university campuses to the real world.
Co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre Neil Armfield says content warnings are one of his “pet hates”, and that some of the above examples are “ludicrous”. Australia’s best-known playwright, David Williamson, agrees, remarking that in the theatre “fear of offending anyone on any issue whatsoever has become, in some cases, extreme. Why has theatre become so timorous?’’
The appeasement of theatregoers with delicate sensibilities is also playing out in the UK. A 2023 Chichester Festival production of The Sound of Music said patrons might find the musical’s depiction of “the threat of Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria’’ distressing.
The Chichester Festival maintained it was giving “honest and factual guidance’’ about the Rodgers & Hammerstein family musical; even so, its warning was widely ridiculed.
Armfield says content warnings are being “over-managed”, due to the “ever-present threat” of social media shaming and fears offended audience members could make legal complaints. “The blanketing of things out of fear and timidity about the legal implications of ... an audience members’ rights if they get distressed, is becoming wildly over managed and wildly overly cautious,’’ he tells Review.
He dissolves into laughter at the assumption The Sound of Music, or a male character telling the woman he fancies that she is “well shaped”, need content warnings.
Trigger warnings can run to several pages per play and often contain huge spoilers. Armfield says he considered the need for them on a case-by-case basis while he was co-directing the Adelaide Festival from 2017 to 2021. He acknowledges there is a limited role for such warnings – there may be a legal requirement to warn audiences about gunshots or strobe lighting (the latter can cause fits), for instance. He admits he should have warned a young transgender acquaintance about a confronting scene in a play that deals with gender transition, after he personally recommended this production.
(Schools also need to be forewarned about scenes involving graphic sex, violence or drug-taking when they sign up their students for theatre excursions.)
On the other hand, Armfield – whose celebrated production of Death of A Salesman, starring Tony Award winner, Anthony LaPaglia, opens in Sydney on May 17 – recalls directing Australian play, The Choir, in 1981. It’s about institutionalised adolescent boys and includes a simulated castration scene. This scene, he says, provoked “regular events in the auditorium where people fainted’’. The patrons were helped into the foyer and the show went on.
Australian Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett recently criticised “trigger warnings’’ for plays and films, suggesting they reflected “a lack of mutual respect” between artists and their audiences. “We are terrified of tough conversations … but we need them,’’ she told The Sunday Times.
Other renowned actors including Ralph Fiennes and Sir Ian McKellen have weighed in on proliferating content warnings in theatre, with the latter calling them “ludicrous” and Fiennes saying they should be ditched. The Grand Budapest Hotel star said that when he was a student, “I never experienced trigger warnings telling me, ‘By the way, in King Lear, Gloucester’s going to have his eyes pulled out’.’’
Nonetheless, London’s Globe theatre has cautioned that Romeo and Juliet contains suicide and drug use, and it was mocked in 2022 after warning that a Julius Caesar production included “depictions of war, self-harm and suicide, stage blood and weapons’’.
Williamson, whose latest play, The Great Divide, has broken box office records at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, notes that in sharp contrast, streamed television dramas and films are expanding the boundaries of what is acceptable, while issuing only general, brief (or no) content warnings. “Film still obviously delights in making us squirm by refusing to disallow depiction of human depravity,’’ says Williamson.
“Barry Keoghan’s grave-top sex in (darkly comic film) Saltburn was graphic, but I didn’t see any warnings. And (the Oscar-winning film) Zone of Interest showed the wife of the Auschwitz commander callously indifferent to the screams and distress just over her garden wall.’’
Williamson asks rhetorically: “Good God, if Nazi behaviour in The Sound of Music could offend, then what would this movie do to such a sensitive soul?’’
The mania for trigger warnings in the theatre reflects how all live productions in Australia – including dance, opera and rock concerts – self-regulate their content. In contrast, films and computer games are assessed by the Australian Classification Board, and television shows are classified by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Industry group Live Performance Australia says there is a “very remote” chance official complaints about offensive on-stage language or acts could be brought against theatre companies or a rock promoter under state laws. It advises “the best way to protect a production against the possibility of being closed down … is to provide adequate warning to the audience members who view that production’’.
However, LPA also says “common community standards’’ and standards used to classify film and TV shows “act as a sound guide to how live work may be received by an audience’’. Clearly, when theatre companies identify a dead crayfish or insect as triggering, something else is going on.
Supporters of content warnings argue they are simply an attempt to fully inform audiences about what they are going to see. The artistic director of Sydney’s Belvoir theatre, Eamon Flack, states plainly: “Some people need them and they’re entitled to them. You’re also entitled to ignore them and come to the theatre ready for anything.’’
Flack also acknowledges that “sitting in discomfort is sometimes part of the deal (in theatre) and it always has been. At the end, the dead characters stand back up again and we applaud ... We can watch the horrors of Antigone because the poetry of its form gives back what the horror takes. Surprise and unexpectedness are essential to drama.’’
Asked by a British journalist if audiences had become too soft, Fiennes replied: “I think they have’’. But Armfield says “in my experience, audiences, especially at a festival, are there for a sort of big experience’’.
Bovell argues “the fact that we are discussing content warnings at the start of shows, rather than the shows themselves, indicates something of a crisis in our theatre and more broadly in our society’’. Like Armfield, he believes content warnings are overused (“the grumpy old man in me says toughen up people”) but sometimes justified.
In his searing adaptation of The Secret River, derived from Kate Grenville’s novel, audiences were warned a massacre of Indigenous people by white colonisers would be re-enacted. He says: “It was shocking and disturbing and out of respect to the descendants of that history, it felt right to acknowledge that this is what would happen on stage.’’
The playwright, who is working with Nicole Kidman on a TV series based on his play, Things I Know To Be True, speculates the trend may reflect a generational divide between those who, like him, believe theatre should challenge and unsettle audiences, and a younger generation. He says: “Content warnings have been driven by a generation who are committed to doing less harm ... in art and in life. I admire them for this. They look at the world their parental generation created, riven by discord and animosity and meanness and ask, ‘Can we create a more inclusive world, in which we take more care in the way we treat each other?’ ’’
In Australia, theatre companies including Black Swan, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre and the MTC are, if anything, doubling down on the trend.
Victoria seems to be sensitivity central. The MTC, which has been issuing detailed content warnings on all of its plays for several years, states on its website: “We are taking a whole organisational approach to cultural safety and representation.’’ Under artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, Victoria’s biggest theatre company is not only working with state and federal bureaucrats’ recommendations on these matters, but has vowed to “take that commitment even further’’.
For their Meet Me At Dawn production (mentioned above), ticket buyers were referred to no fewer than four mental health charities, because the play deals with death and mourning. Remarkably, the two-hander’s references to common health conditions also attracted trigger warnings: “Reference is made to concussion, dementia, bladder infections causing confusion, a description of skin picking and poor mental health requiring antidepressants.’’
Prominent Melbourne theatre company, Malthouse, which specialises in new work, takes content warnings so seriously, it creates them in real time, updating its website during rehearsals. The company explains its wraparound approach to subscribers thus: “We do our best to warn you well in advance regarding what you’re about to see … You’ll find age recommendations and content warnings here on our website, pre-show emails, in your program and in the foyer.’’
Malthouse’s production, The Hate Race, staged earlier this year, was inspired by the best-selling memoir by Afro-Caribbean poet Maxine Beneba Clark, and included her experiences of racism while growing up in western Sydney. While racism is a topic that needs to be handled sensitively, Malthouse’s content warning was nothing if not thorough. It explained: “The forms of racism explored within the show are: interpersonal racism; institutional racism; systemic racism; internalised racism and cultural appropriation.’’
It also warns The Hate Race includes racial slurs, verbal “microaggressions’’ and “a scene which speaks about an act of racial violence Maxine has committed towards another student’’. Do theatregoers really need to be forewarned that a black playwright has owned up to an unacceptable incident from her school days?
Queensland Theatre’s acclaimed production Tiny Beautiful Things, adapted from American Cheryl Stayed’s novel, deals with an ex-heroin addict turned advice columnist, and toured to Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre in late summer, with Mandy McElhinney in the lead role. Tiny Beautiful Things has also been adapted as a mini-series that streams on Disney + with an MA15+ rating. Belvoir warned patrons the play uses real letters seeking help from the agony aunt character. Some of these letters included “complex conversations around life, death and love. Nothing is depicted or re-enacted, only discussed from the perspective of giving advice to heal.’’
One could be forgiven for assuming that “complex conversations around life, death and love” account for most of the theatrical canon.
Ironically, a study co-authored by Flinders University academic Victoria M. E. Bridgland and published in the Clinical Psychological Science journal in January, found that trigger warnings appeared to increase people’s anxiety before they saw sensitive material, and did not alleviate their distress. “Existing published research almost unanimously suggests that trigger warnings do not mitigate distress,” Bridgland and her co-authors wrote.
In other words, trigger warnings can be triggering.
Bovell says there is nothing wrong with people researching a show’s content. He adds: “Personally, I go to the theatre hoping to be shocked, confronted, disturbed and challenged, and I don’t want to be warned that this is what will happen to me. I want to be surprised and taken off-guard. These are important narrative tools used to create a powerful experience for an audience. If we forewarn them, are we in danger of diminishing the experience?’’
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