Chapter 572 of the Infantilization Chronicles:
Romeo and Juliet audiences have been given an entire page of warnings about suicide, fake blood and stage fighting for a new prodution at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Oh gosh, really? Suicide? Fighting? I had no idea, I thought it was about a couple of kittens who find a ball of yarn and hilarity ensues.
The double suicide of the star-crossed lovers has been deemed a mental health issue in a guide reminding viewers that the actors playing Romeo and Juliet do not really die at the end of the play.
They don’t??? Who knew?
This “sensitivity” is all the more bizarre given the movies and tv shows and video games everyone is steeped in. I could see Cousin Joe from deep in the country who’s never seen a play or a tv show or a movie and has never read a book and never talked to any humans needing to be told that the actors aren’t really dead, but other than that…
More seriously…I think people who are so fragile that they can’t deal with onstage violence probably don’t go to the theater. I also don’t think this is a left-right thing particularly, it’s more a…what…therapy culture versus get a grip culture. There’s a kind of cult of fragility going on, which we’re all too familiar with in relation to the people who keep yelling that trans people are the most oppressed ever. Encouraging people to think they’re so weak and excitable that they think stage murder is real is not doing them a favor. Most people are not made of crystal and don’t shatter at a touch.
Comments
21 responses to “Warning: they die at the end”
Wow, this takes me back to the first time I watched The Neverending Story. That goddamn swamp scene where the horse dies had me distraught, and that was when my mum decided it was time I learned that movies aren’t real.
I was about six or seven.
Snout: Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.
Bottom: Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck. And he himself must speak through, saying thus—or to the same defect—“Ladies,” or “Fair ladies,” “I would wish you” or “I would request you” or “I would entreat you” “not to fear, not to tremble, my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing. I am a man as other men are.” And there indeed let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.
Bloody Hell!
I cannot imagine how they would have reacted to the King Lear I was SM for in the 1970s. Goneril’s guts spilled all over the stage, Edmund, broken on a wheel with blood and eyeballs popping out. Or our production of Son of Man where Christ really did appear to die on the cross, so good was the actor in that role.
A couple of years ago, I had a play where two computers entered a suicide pact to get back at their owners. I had to remove the word “suicide”, and turn it into a prank.
@2 good one.
I used to know a guy whose father had been an opera singer, whose family had a story about how as a young child he ran up onto the stage during a rehearsal to defend his father from being attacked in a Wagner opera.
An actor I knew once played in a stage production of TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral , as one of the four knights who dispose of Archbishop Thomas Becket. Afterwards, they address the audience directly, explaining why, however repugnant it was, it was so very necessary.
During one speech an indignant voice from up in ‘The Gods” (the cheap seats) rang out through the darkened theatre: “You did it, you bloody murderers!”
The actor said that such moments become treasured memories for any thespian.
Not going to lie, those all sound awesome…
I went to a Macbeth at the Globe where so much blood was flung around that they spread a black rubber mat over the groundlings, for them to stick their heads through, so that the blood didn’t get all over them. (Don’t recall having received a content warning before that performance….)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzVWOf4rp8
Holms, I’m pretty sure I knew movies aren’t real when I saw The Neverending Story for the first (second, third, umpteenth) time and I was still distraught. Hell, it was on tv a year or two ago and my mum and I made my step dad and step sister watch it because they had never seen it, and I suddenly realised I had to urgently leave the room. One of my childhood traumas, that scene.
Irrelevant thoughts on “thespian”: there are people who confuse “thespian” and “lesbian”. It would be interesting if the “T” in “LGBT” referred to thespians. Maybe it does, come to think of it.
Sackbut:
@# 10: It probably does. There is considerable overlap, I am told, between the two categories.
On another note, my English teacher at high school spoke with a pronounced lisp. He would have pronounced those words as ‘thethpian’ and ‘lethbian.’ We studied under his guidance Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which contains the play-within-the-play entitled ‘Pyramuth and Thithbe’.
Memorable stuff. ;-)
In Irreversible Damage: the transgender craze seducing our daughters, Shrier suggests a possible connection between transgender ideology and therapeutic culture based on something she noted in her interviews. When parents would discuss teenage daughters who suddenly identified as boys, they’d often try to explain how unexpected this was by pointing out how much therapy and psychological counseling their daughters had already received — if not from professionals, then from parents. These were not girls who were made to face troubles and trials without adult support. They were encouraged to reflect on their feelings, love their true selves, and communicate all this to Mom and Dad. The daughters treated their parents as loving confidantes. If they had truly been suffering their whole lives from an inner conviction that they were boys, how would this not have come up?
Shrier wonders if this nurturing atmosphere could have backfired. Instead of creating strong, independent women, it may have fostered a fragile, self-focused mindset convinced that all problems would be cured if they just learn to Be Themselves.
That’s interesting. It jibes with my beady-eyed view of therapy culture, which is that it seems to train people to focus on themselves instead of everything else there is to focus on, and that that’s not so much therapeutic as a road to self-obsession and selfishness.
Huh, when I said that I’d forgotten that I ended the post with therapy culture and learned fragility. Ok it’s both: self-obsession AND learned fragility.
Nasty combination innit.
@guest 5 – I saw a broadcast of a National Theatre production of a Richard II with Simon Russell Beale – the cast were pouring buckets of blood over each other. They were in a terrible mess by the end. (Apart from that did you enjoy the show? Yes, it and Simon Russell Beale were good.)
https://valleyadvocate.com/2019/05/06/stagestruck-scully-scandal-and-buckets-of-blood-national-theatre-live-in-amherst/
I did a google to find the play and it seems that buckets of blood are used quite a lot. Blood has always been popular – players used to have bladders of blood or blood-substitute concealed under their costumes.
Re Lear – actually I have to confess that I can’t stomach Gloucester’s eyes being taken out.
Don’t take them to see Ol’ Yeller. It’s a puppy snuff film.
I remember when such warnings were for gunshots, strobe lights, and stage fog, with the occasional note regarding coarse language and nudity.
I must admit, I often consult IMDB for content warnings about violence and gore in movies I’m considering. I’m not really interested in seeing people butchered, bludgeoned, and eviscerated in graphic, close-up detail.
Unfortunately, given how some men are, there are many instances where you’d be better off facing the lion.
YNnB, I remember when they used to warn you about smoking on stage. Now in the age of “smokeless” cigarettes, they don’t bother. My husband and I usually like to sit up front because there is better leg room and he can hear and see the performance. I have found that the “smokeless” tobacco still gives me problems. It may be psychosomatic, but it is very definitely somatic, much more so than seeing Juliet kill herself.
Sastra,
I was going to say the same thing about Shrier’s book. She makes several other (convincing, I think) arguments that over-nurturing can be problematic (to say the least). She summarises this in the introduction, where she suggests that while children are in many ways more protected than they’ve ever been, they aren’t able to develop the emotional scar tissue that we Ancient Ones have to protect us against trivial harms. Then she expands on this in several ways.
She’s talking about transing, of course, but I think we can generalise it as a miscalibration of responses to the world. We see that in this drive for crazy over-protection from pretend things; in the unsatisfied need for teenage rebellion leading to extreme, lifelong drastic decisions; in the now routine bizarre disconnect between a perceived wrong and the demanded consequences…
I don’t think over-nurturing is the cause of all the world’s ills and as a quite seriously neglected child I’m aware that my own responses are often miscalibrated in the other direction, but we do seem to be locked into an over-protection spiral and since nothing good has come of it so far, I doubt wherever we’re all spat out will feel great.
That certainly chimes. I wasn’t neglected by any means, but my earlier years were certainly turbulent and by western standards impoverished. There’s scar tissue aplenty. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but I do think the ability to cope with (indeed brush off) some highly unpleasant experiences and interactions is a necessity for a functional adult. You can’t develop that skill as an adult. You have to learn it as a child.
The family I’m staying with at the moment are lovely people who have made me very welcome. I love them dearly. The kids have been, in my view, over nurtured though. One of them has developed a high degree of sensitivity to anything other than permissive affirmation. Because he’s now on the verge of teenager hood he’s being expected to start performing pretty basic functions for himself (making lunch say) as well as helping with chores around the house. Simply being shown or told how a task can be performed properly or better leads to loud accusations of being mean, horrible, or even bullying. Even the highly nurturing mother is saying nah-uh. This hasn’t happened just at home. The school system is so devoid of any form of correction or behaviour other than affirmation that many kids are simply never running up against anything that challenges them emotionally until they hit the outside world. It doesn’t stand them in good stead.
This is the only book I gave to my son that he’s read twice:
https://www.thecoddling.com
I found their argument well laid out and coherent. My son said that one of the tokenistic books (you know, we need a book by an _x_) included in Freshman Seminar should be replaced by this book.