Live performance is being sanitized beyond recognition. From its inception, live performance was intended to provoke, produce strong emotions and reactions, nudge or yank its audience out of its comfort zone. It was a dangerous space where anything could happen; where anything could happen to you as a spectator or witness. At its best, live theatre was exciting and changed you as a human being. It changed your emotional and psychological DNA. It left you a quivering wreck.
Unfortunately today live performance is being served up as tasteless and unsatisfying as a Macdonalds. Safe. Conformist. Ultimately carcinogenic to our culture, our sense of self and our resilience to face uncomfortable questions about our world. Audiences are being infantilized.
Last summer my teenage daughter and I attended a performance of a 400 year old play at a certain national treasure on the South Bank. The production was full of trigger warnings and the company was lauded in the national press for taking this ‘brave’ and ‘responsible’ decision. When it came time for the ‘triggering’ moments to be played out on stage, my daughter and I howled… with laughter. The performance was ultimately flaccid and full of its own self-importance in dealing with ‘social’ issues. Only it didn’t deal with them, it side-stepped them by doing everything it could to ‘protect’ the audience from experiencing them at an emotional and visceral level. Schiller once wrote that theatre should be a “Moral institution…the home of a nation’s conscience”. What does the current state of British theatre and its avoidance in challenging, provoking and even offending its audience say about us? Artaud, Kane and Shakespeare must be rolling in their graves.
Let’s be adult about this. Just because you are offended does not make you right. Your offense is your problem. To be offended is an intellectual process: you decide whether you want to be offended or not. I am not arguing that offence cannot be a real insult (such as attacking someone because of a legal protected characteristic) but it can also be a ‘perceived’ one. People who are repeatedly and easily offended could be construed as being somewhat narcissistic. But the most offensive factor here (and I use that word deliberately) is that there is an implied feeling that their moral compass is superior to yours; your lack of offense is construed by them as your moral failing.
Personally, I’ve never liked boxing so I don’t go to boxing matches. Its existence and the fact that millions of people love boxing doesn’t offend me. If I did go to a match I wouldn’t expect to be patronised with a trigger warning. I don’t feel excluded from going to boxing matches; I choose not to. Maybe if you are going to be easily offended by certain themes and issues, then don’t go. As we used to say to Mary Whitehouse, just switch off the telly. But please don’t force your moral compass on the rest of us. If you got your way, we would be living in a Margaret Atwood dystopia or Arthur Miller’s Crucible. I make no apology if you found those analogies offensive of ‘triggering.’ Most great art is, well, triggering.
Bad art is a trigger too.