You could not move for content warnings at the Almeida theatre this August. Plastered across the mirrors of the loos—where else do we confront our vulnerabilities?—were posters telling us that the play we were to see contained graphic depictions of abortion. That didn’t stop one man yelling at the cast during an early performance, insisting he hadn’t been sufficiently warned. He wasn’t disrupting the performance as such: it had already been disrupted, as it was most nights, by audience members fainting, wailing or rushing from the auditorium to vomit.
The play in question is Eline Arbo’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s book The Years, newly restaged in English. The Years is a work of autofiction—a blending-together of memoir and fiction—in which Ernaux re-creates herself as an avatar for a generation of French women who came of age around 1968. The story is hers, but the subject is “we” and the experience is collective.
The theatrical retelling is moving, lilting between light and shade. It helps that Arbo has assembled five leading English actors to play the narrator at staggered stages. (Who doesn’t want to see Gina McKee as a divorcée rediscovering sex, making love to a chair that represents her toyboy?) When I recommended the show in Prospect’s culture newsletter, I told readers to “go, go, go and ignore the warnings”.
Nothing on opening night remotely resembled the stories of a show that left viewers unconscious. Those stories must be wildly exaggerated, I concluded in my bulletin: “None of this was visible on press night—perhaps theatre critics are a hardier bunch—and, to be honest... there’s nothing on stage here that menstruating women haven’t seen before.”
All this leaves me in the position of owing Prospect readers an apology. Clearly, I was wrong. Almost every night during its summer run, The Years was paused to allow for medical assistance to audience members who had fainted. Almost every night—but not press night.
In defence of my initial scepticism, it’s a common trick for theatres to plant news stories about fainting audience members. The Globe’s 2014 production of Titus Andronicus received a suspicious amount of free publicity thanks to stories of swooning. When the National Theatre staged Sarah Kane’s Cleansed in 2016, in which lovers in a totalitarian dystopia endure stomach-churning tortures for each other, the theatre’s social media accounts enthusiastically tweeted out newspapers’ reports of walkouts.
The fainting attacks at The Years, however, are now well attested. Which invites a question: why did a press audience have such a different emotional response? Is it simply that critics, as I originally put it, “are a hardier bunch”? Or does something dull our capacity for empathy when we enter the theatre as an act of labour? (Press night, of course, includes not just critics but industry colleagues; I gather only one person discreetly slipped out the back.)
Is it simply that critics are a hardier bunch? Or does something dull our capacity for empathy when we enter the theatre as an act of labour?
Most critics do experience theatre differently when they’re “on duty”, with an immediate review to write. I find that the act of taking notes during a performance creates a formal barrier between myself and the performers. There’s the literal distraction of repeatedly taking my eyes away from the stage to my notepaper, but that creates a more significant emotional barrier too—a ritual that constructs distance.
When it comes to plays such as The Years and Cleansed, too much critical distance can be particularly limiting. Although The Years is a far less violent work, both are interested in how subjectivity is forged in characters through them being acted upon by a world. As the critic Tim Bano has written of Kane’s characters in the torture chamber, “they act, and they are acted upon” in extremis; speaking to Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, on of the actors in The Years, Romola Garai, argued that “the history of the later part of the 20th century is written on the bodies of women”. The critic who sits in the auditorium, ready to stamp his or her authority on the performer with a pencil, is in a completely different place from the characters on stage; a place of power, not powerlessness.
Everyone in the usual audiences at the Almeida, however, has surely had some reason to feel an emotional response. Both Almeida staff and audience members I’ve spoken to were adamant that, contrary to news reports, the fainters have been equally male and female, not exclusively male. Which suggests that this is not simply a case of men being unable to cope with women bleeding from the womb.
Instead, audience reactions hinge on Garai’s performance and on the precision of Ernaux’s language, rather than the gore on stage. Major disruptions to performances—10-minute pauses while spectators were carried out—usually followed a narration by Garai’s character of the experience of disposing of her aborted foetus. I was not the only critic to find the levels of blood on stage relatively insignificant: in the TLS, Rosemary Waugh wrote that “the blood mentioned in the content warnings is far too paint-like to provoke repulsion”. Language and gesture, on the other hand, when deployed like forceps, can trigger emotion at its most visceral.
Some have seized on these events as proof of the value of content warnings. That doesn’t quite follow: the widespread visibility of such warnings clearly failed to prevent this production from being derailed by audience distress. Theatregoers can’t know from a warning exactly how an act of theatre will affect them in the moment—nor should they.
What critics should ponder instead is how we all missed out on the theatrical experience that everybody else underwent at the Almeida this summer. Don’t get me wrong—I’m relieved not to have vomited or fainted my way through a vital piece of theatre. It is possible, however, that the critic’s skin can grow too thick.
