Tragedy helps you to enjoy life’s good bits, Shakespeare knew that

NOT many people ever walked into a performance of Romeo And Juliet expecting a comedy.

Still, Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers has been delighting audiences for more than four centuries.

Marc Brenner

Only today is it necessary to warn them what they are about to see might shock or even upset them.

As The Sun revealed yesterday, the Globe Theatre in London is issuing a warning to theatregoers at performances of the play.

They are warned that what they are about to see includes scenes of suicide.

And not just that, but fake blood. In case anyone thought that people get murdered for real on stage.

The audience is also issued with a number for the Samaritans, so they can call the group in case the performance in some way “triggers” them.

In one sense this is just an act of stupidity. It reminds me of the daytime television host some years ago who was reviewing the film Titanic.

In passing, he said that the action in the movie really picks up once the ship hits the iceberg. At which point multiple viewers apparently called in to complain that he had given away the plot.

There will always be some people who don’t know the Titanic sank or that Romeo and Juliet failed to live happily ever after. But that doesn’t really matter.

In some ways those people are lucky. They have an even more exciting evening ahead of them.

What matters more is that this age thinks it has to warn people about any upset they might feel. Including from the greatest tragedies in the English language.

This is an extension of something that has been growing for years. We have heard for some time about helicopter parenting, where parents hover around their children, endlessly trying to protect them from every possible harm.

Now it seems that movement has extended to the adult world.

It is as though our society thinks that adults are so fragile that they too must be protected from anything nasty or unpleasant that might happen to them in life.

It is the essence of woke, which thinks people can be endlessly protected from nasty words. From nasty ideas. And from nasty facts.

As well as treating adults like children, this movement is also highly unlikely to work. Because adults cannot be protected from all of the unpleasant facts of life. Or at least they cannot be protected for ever.

ecause life includes a lot of nasty facts. People behave selfishly. People let you down. People die.

All of this, and more, is true. It is called the human condition. It is part of being alive. And the knowledge of it makes us live fuller lives.

In the same way, knowing what tragedy can occur in life makes us appreciate life more. To understand its tragedy is to understand its beauty.

One of the ways in which we learn these things is through films and art.

There we see blown-up versions of things we experience in our own lives. We see played out on stage and screen things we recognise. And which help make sense of our own existence.

That is why plays such as Romeo And Juliet have endured. It is not just that they contain some of the most beautiful lines in the English language.

And it is not just that the plot is gripping. It is also that seeing the tragedy gives the viewer a greater sense of life.

But the woke era isn’t interested in that. It thinks it already knows everything.

Crucially, it is uninterested in the views or knowledge of earlier eras. It thinks everyone and everything in the past was racist and bigoted.

It thinks it should police the past as it polices the present, telling us all what we should find funny. As well as what we should say and know.

It treats grown-ups as though we were babies. As though we can live our lives surrounded in cotton wool.

That is why you hear stories of “trigger warnings” and more coming out of universities. Because the age of babyhood has long been extended to students. And now it is extended to adults out in the real world.

Some people think the woke will take over. That the sensitivity tsars will triumph and appear in every walk of life.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Because you can run from the facts of life, and you can be protected from some of them. But not for ever.

The facts of life have a habit of catching up with people. People should hope that this happens on a stage.

Because it is better than when it happens in real time to yourself.

So let the theatres run plays without warnings. Let’s have meaningful disagreements about real things. And let’s learn to be grown-ups again.

Something that starts by telling the woke censors what we think of them. And that their script does not run here.

Easy as ABC for Biden

Eyevine

PRESIDENT Biden came out of hiding this week.

This time to give an interview to a favoured American network. In the chat on ABC, the President was his usual bumbling, contradictory, angry and confused self.

He did not come across well as he tried to justify his decision to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban.

But now it appears that the interview was even worse than what aired. The ABC News network apparently edited it. ABC has been accused of cutting out parts that showed Biden in an even more negative light.

For instance, he apparently got confused about his late son Beau. He claimed Beau had served in the Navy in Afghanistan.

A country which is landlocked. In fact, Biden Jr served in the Army in Iraq.

That is not a small mistake. It speaks to the fact that the Commander in Chief is confused about personal matters as much as he is about major world affairs.

But the apparent cover-up at ABC is a reminder of how Biden – and America – got here. So desperate was most of the US media to get Biden into office (and to keep him there) that they seem willing to do anything.

It is not just that they never ask him any of the difficult questions. It is that they appear willing to cover for the President’s mistakes and even erase them from the record.

No pride in sick lion killing

AMERICA has so many good things going for it. Other than its choice of presidents.

But one thing baffling to a lot of us is the strange obsession with guns and all other forms of killing.

Most Americans don’t indulge in it, but a certain type of American will travel halfway round the world to kill a wild animal.

A case emerged this week of just that. A US tourist apparently travelled to Zimbabwe, where he then killed a magnificent 12-year-old lion called Mopane. With a bow and arrow.

The case brought echoes of the killing of Cecil the lion by American dentist Walter Palmer in 2015. Something that horrified people around the world.

And it is horrific. There is almost nothing in nature more impressive than watching lions in their natural habitat.

I have had the honour of seeing them in the wild on trips to Africa. Nothing could have been further from my mind than to try to end the life of one of these majestic beasts.

And there is something so unjust and unfair about a human doing this. And flying around the world to do so. All to satisfy some strange machismo fantasy.

I’d guess that it is to make up for the lack of a certain something. I think we can all guess what.

More Khan waste

MAYOR of London Sadiq Khan has reportedly sacked the co-chair of his Violence Against Women And Girls Board.

Joan Smith is a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights and had worked in the role, unpaid, for eight years.

Now she says she has been sacked because she raised concerns about transgender women being allowed into women’s refuges.

That is, to places where victims of rape and domestic abuse seek help. Khan’s office has denied these claims.

Smith’s concerns are legitimate. Women in such places have to know they are safe.

At the very least the question of transgender women there needs serious debate.

In a letter to Mayor Khan, Smith apparently suggested that victims of male violence should not have to share refuge spaces with “individuals who have male bodies”.

Smith claims she has since been thanked for her services, given the heave-ho and told her role will now be filled by a City Hall official.

So instead of somebody who knows their stuff giving their time for free, it appears the taxpayer will now have to pay someone who will most likely know nothing.

Or someone who just says all the bland things bland and overpaid officials are meant to say on the public dime.

And that is Mayor Khan’s City Hall in a nutshell. Dogmatic, arrogant, wasteful and wrong.