The New Yorker:

Dozens of audience members have lost consciousness watching Eline Arbo’s adaptation of “The Years.” The internet has come to believe that a conspiracy is afoot.

By Anna Russell

The last time Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy “Titus Andronicus” was staged at the Globe Theatre, in London, in 2014, members of the audience regularly fainted. Each performance, the crew kept a running tally of the fallen. Recovering theatregoers were placed in a separate box for the remainder of the show. “I used to be disappointed if I got three fainters,” the production’s director, Lucy Bailey, recently told me. Her previous staging of “Titus,” in 2006, once caused upward of forty faintings in one sitting. A team of paramedics was stationed outside.

The swooners, we presume, were well hydrated and not wearing corsets. And while “Titus” is full of extreme violence—at one point, the Roman general serves two brothers in a pie to their mother—the audience at the Globe had likely seen worse in “Game of Thrones.” But Bailey told me that people wouldn’t necessarily faint on a visual. Halfway through, Titus’s rival Aaron merely suggests that he chop off his hand. “And on the word ‘chop,’ you could almost guarantee you would hear someone bang and hit the ground,” Bailey said. The buildup of grief in the play is like listening to a tenor sing at a high pitch for an extended period of time, she said. “The audience would be so wound up that by the time there was any threat of other violence added into that mix, you were very vulnerable to fainting,” she said. “So it was blood that made you faint, but it was also the threat of activity through language.”

Lately, London audiences have taken to fainting during a play significantly less bloody than “Titus.” (We seem to be a suggestible bunch.) “The Years,” Eline Arbo’s beautifully observed adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir by the same name, opened at the Harold Pinter Theatre in January after a summer run at the Almeida. The play tells the story of Ernaux’s life set against the backdrop of world events, beginning with her childhood in the nineteen-forties and ending in the mid-two-thousands. Annie is played by five superb actors—Gina McKee, Deborah Findlay, Tuppence Middleton, Harmony Rose-Bremner, and Anjli Mohindra—who each narrate a different stage of her life. Throughout the run, the cast has frequently had to pause, lights on, as ushers rush to attend to a viewer who has lost consciousness. Sometimes they stop the production more than once. (At least the Pinter, unlike the Globe, is seated, so there’s less chance of injury.) The faintings often occur during a scene in which Annie describes the aftermath of an illegal abortion. This, plus the rumor that most of the faintees are men, has led to a flurry of coverage. “West End Theatre Forced to Pause Play After Attendees Faint After Gory Back-Street Abortion Scene,” the Daily Mail reported.

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