Judi Dench says trigger warnings ruin viewer experience: 'If you’re that sensitive, don’t go to the theater'
15.05.2024 - 23:37
/ foxnews.com
Dame Judi Dench was asked about her opinion on trigger warnings in theater productions, to which she responded that audience members with sensitive natures might avoid the theater altogether. She expressed skepticism toward the necessity of content advisories, asking what the point of going to the theater actually is.
"I can see why they exist, and it is preparing people, I suppose, but if you’re that sensitive, don’t go to the theater, because you could be very shocked," Dench said during an interview published this week in "Radio Times" magazine. "Why go to the theater if you're going to be warned about things that are in the play? Isn’t the whole business of going to the theater about seeing something that you can be excited, surprised, or stimulated by? It’s like being told they're all dead at the end of ‘King Lear.’ I don't want to be told," the English actress continued.
Dench’s remarks echo the comments made by fellow thespians Matt Smith and Ralph Fiennes. When asked in February about trigger warnings on BBC One’s "Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg," Fiennes said, "I think we didn’t use to have trigger warnings.
I mean, they are very disturbing scenes in ‘Macbeth,’ terrible murders and things… the impact of theater should be that you’re 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 for shows." "Shakespeare’s plays are full of murderers, full of horror.
As a young student and lover of the theater, I never experienced trigger warnings telling me: ‘By the way, in ‘King Lear,’ Gloucester is going to have his eyes pulled out'… Theater has to be alive and connect in the present. It’s the shock, the unexpected, that’s what
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