A movie ending that’s guaranteed to make me cry is that of Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è Bella. After spending almost the whole movie fabricating a fantasy world in order to protect his small child from the horrors of living in a concentration camp, Guido is finally caught. But he is determined to spend his last moments on earth doing what he loves most and is best at: making his son laugh. A Nazi guard walks behind him with a gun, and he does a silly walk to amuse the little boy, who is hiding in a slatted metal box. Only after he is no longer on screen do we hear the gunshot. This conclusion is a hundred times more effective for hiding Guido’s death; quite apart from the fact that it would just be borderline sadistic to show us the body of such a lovable and self-sacrificing character, the director decides on purpose to momentarily put us in the little boy’s shoes. What the child sees is what we see, and children, as storytellers are always reminding us, often see the world in an untainted way compared to adults. There are plenty of disturbing scenes in the movie, but we are given a taste of the child’s innocence, even if just for an instant.

“Tampering with other authors’ works for stage adaptation purposes is always a gamble”

La Vita è Bella, however, is a work of cinema, not an amateur play. Roberto Benigni never intended for his movie to be factually accurate to real concentration camps, or to act as a kind of analogue. He knew from the start that it would function more as a moving display of paternal love based on historical events, and certain real atrocities would be censored or not included. Although Cambridge students often produce their own material for the ADC or Corpus Playroom, guided only by their personal gauges of obfuscation and openness, they also frequently decide to put their own spins on pre-existing works – make changes to the fruits of another’s imagination. Creativity of adaptation is, in fact, one of Cambridge theatre’s richest delights – but it can be risky.

Tampering with other authors’ works for stage adaptation purposes, even when motivated by the desire for accessibility and audience-friendliness, is always a gamble. This can be as much the case when something is added as when something is taken away. I watched a production of Othello at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse almost two years ago, which, despite its emotionally gripping performances and directorial flourishes, was a little underserved by heavy-handed insertions of modern London Met Police headlines, which attempted to create unsubtle and oversimplified analogies with modern racism. This is anti-censorship; the unnecessary forcing in of elements that work well intrinsically but feel hammy in a given context.

“Trigger warnings can be instructive, even vital, and should be retained. But what also should be retained are the tough parts of student theatrical productions”

What of expurgating? It is rumoured that some Sopranos viewers cancelled their HBO subscriptions after a young pregnant stripper was brutally beaten to death in the Season Three episode ‘University’, a move that, while extreme, was also to be expected of American network TV watchers. Here, no such option exists; you’d probably attract some weird looks from supportive friends and family members if you walked out in the middle of something a Cambridge student had written. Trigger warnings and potted internet summaries are available more than ever before when it comes to live productions; one could argue that there’s really no reason not to come prepared. There might be a few (hypothetical) benefits of excising bigoted language, violence and other upsetting material from student productions; audience reliability could be one. People would be less likely to get scared and throw away their tickets after reading what the play was about.

But again, we live in the age of social media, where footage of shootings is circulated as easily and offhandedly as wellness advice. Is there anything we, as twenty-something-year-olds, can be presented with onstage that we won’t already have read about in a book or been blighted with on a screen? This is not even allowing for subconscious self-censorship; who’s to say that student writers aren’t already automatically ridding their work of what might trouble their peers? Trigger warnings can be instructive, even vital, and should be retained. But what also should be retained are the tough parts of student theatrical productions. To get rid of them would be to underestimate our own durability.

The stage is not your living room TV. You can’t fast-forward or change the channel. Perhaps, then, the happy medium between two extremes is encouraging a culture of pre-theatrical research; refraining from censorship, but ensuring that all potential audiences know exactly what they’re walking into.