Many things about modern life make me bang my head repeatedly against my living room wall in frustration – which is bad for my cranium, but very lucrative for the plasterers, painters and decorators I have on speed dial to repair the damage.
The damage to the wall. Not my cranium.
Some recently-applied plaster, together with two light fittings and a mirror that hung on my next-door neighbour’s adjoining wall, suffered impact damage from my forehead after I’d read that the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames issued a ‘trigger warning’ to potential audiences that one of their productions contained scenes that might upset them.
In case you were unaware, the Globe stages plays written by a fellah called William Shakespeare, who…spoiler alert…died 400 years ago!
Many of the Bard of Avon’s full-blooded dramas have tragic final scenes. In “Hamlet”, only Horatio survives. Macbeth’s head is chopped off by Macduff. The career of “Julius Caesar” is ended – as often happens to people in positions of power – by a bunch of envious backstabbers.
And no one has ever gone to see “King Lear” for the jokes.
Audiences in previous centuries didn’t need warnings. Why do we?
I wonder what American tourists thought when The Globe produced “Romeo And Juliet” and warned “The play contains poison and fake blood”?
“Forget it, honey! They’re not using real blood!”.
Most people, even if they haven’t seen any of the stage, film and TV adaptations of the tale (or the updated musical version “West Side Story”) know the star-crossed lovers both cop it at the end – a moment which should bring an audience to tears.
As in life, sad things happen in drama and books.
As we grow up, they help us learn about death and grief and we shouldn’t be shielded from them.
No-one gave me a trigger warning that “All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men couldn’t put Humpty together again” or that Little Johnny Green threw “Pussy in the well”.
Actually, having been scrammed by next door’s cat that morning, it cheered me up no end!