Reviews

Spring Awakening

MB Productions’ Spring Awakening is a dark gem that signals a loving return to basics: a fluid, beautiful text (in a new translation by Thea Warren), painstakingly directed by emerging young talent Asia Osborne with a solid ensemble cast.

But there is a twist: what the audience sees on stage is not a group of German teenagers, but unnamed actors playing those teenagers. And so begins a dizzying hormonal game of play-acting and gender-swapping as they direct each other and attempt to control the increasingly dramatic chain of events that make up Frank Wedekind’s work.

It would be easy to lazily synopsise the play with that oft-used phrase, teenage angst. But this is so much more: a lyrical navigation through the emerging euphemistically-described “manly impulses” of adolescence in a repressive 19th Century Germany, a kind of teenage 1984 of sneaking exam results from the staff room and letters from parents’ desks, in which words or even thoughts about sex become torturous, even criminal.

Martha (Antonia Tam), an abused girl, envisages a perfect upbringing to be wild and untamed. “When I have children, I’ll let them grow like the weeds in our garden. No one takes any notice of them but they grow so tall, so strong,” she says, wistfully. It’s serious stuff.

The star of this play is the rather hopeless, but endearingly troubled, Moritz, played by Joe Eyre. Awkward and frenetic, Eyre keeps up his nervous energy until his climatic suicide, wisely directed to be committed offstage to avoid the eternal theatrical problem of the unconvincing stage death. In a play that races by at 100 mph, the occasional, carefully chosen silences – after Moritz’s death, after Melchior beats Wendla at her request – are cavernous, unsettling moments for the audience. Equally matched in talent to Eyre is James Corrigan, playing his best friend Melchior. There is a struggle to find a balance between the mature self-assurance of his character, and a convincing portrayal of a young teenager, but he remains utterly compelling throughout. 

However, this production is not perfect. It’s long, and the second act is somewhat relentless. At times, the audience seems to be forgotten, as the sketchy nature of the way the play is cut and pasted together, with the actors jumping from scene to scene and reassigning roles, is bewildering. At times, it is impossible to follow. The aping of elderly, crusty teachers and uptight parents fails to be as funny as it seeks to be, although it allows for a very moving contrasting sequence in which John-Mark Philo, stepping away from the part of school boy to play Wendla’s mother, abandons the pantomime in his daughter’s dying moments. Overall, however, an effective, striking success.

– Elli Hollington (reviewed at Camden People’s Theatre)