Is this a trigger warning I see before me?

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. I can see why they exist, but if you’re that sensitive, don’t go to the theatre.” Sir Ian McKellen – himself currently starring as Falstaff in a fat suit, in a West End production – has called trigger warnings in theatres “ludicrous”, adding: “I quite like to be surprised by loud noises and outrageous behaviour on stage.” Certainly, trigger warnings have become so silly of late to have rendered the very thing redundant. Now, anything that might leave your average grievance Olympian literally shaking – I’ve heard of pre-performance apologies being made for strong language, dated attitudes, discussions of bereavement, on-stage smoking, “weapons, including knives”, “distressing scenes of music, family and romance” and even “theatrical fog” – is worthy of a warning. For his part, Fiennes wondered if today’s audiences have gone soft: “Shakespeare’s plays are full of murder and full of horror,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “and as a young student and lover of the theatre, I never experienced trigger warnings like: ‘Oh, by the way, in King Lear, Gloucester’s going to have his eyes pulled out.’” The 61-year-old actor has made a career out of characters who slowly, quietly unsettle his audiences – in Schindler’s List, playing a commandant who used concentration camp prisoners for target practice; as the unassuming serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs prequel Red Dragon. Of course, the trigger warning habit has germinated in academia – on university courses that warn adult undergraduates that the novels of Jane Austen contain “toxic relationships and friendships”, that Robert Louis Stephenson’s novel Kidnapped includes scenes of abduction, and that the classic children’s bedtime story Peter Pan might prove “emotionally challenging”.