Pains of Youth
From: Wednesday, 21st October 2009
To: Thursday, 21 January 2010
Our Review: 
Your Reviews:
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Synopsis
Vienna, 1923. A discontented post-war generation diagnose youth to be their sickness and do their best to destroy it. Promiscuous, pitiless and bored, six sexually entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the young, pretty maid, with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for the ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn’t waste any time weeping Desiree wants her.
Our Review:
Michael Coveney - 29 October 2009
It is good to see this extraordinary play of love and decadence among medical students in Vienna between the wars brought into sharp focus at the National after several fringe productions in the last 20 years.
The Austrian author, Ferdinand Bruckner, was an American exile from Hitler’s Germany, but his career in the slipstream of Kraus and Schnitzler was fractured by the move – he returned to Germany in 1951 - and he remains best known for this torrid and tortured 1926 masterpiece.
The British premiere of Pains of Youth was a scalding affair at the Gate, with Joanne Pearce making a breakthrough appearance as the bisexual, suicidal Desiree in the boarding house where she’s completing preparation for her final exams.
Director Katie Mitchell’s approach is a clinical atomisation of the play, in a new version by Martin Crimp (the literal translation by Lucy Gribble goes shamefully unacknowledged in the NT programme) that is brilliantly conceived b...
Latest User Review
addicted to theatre - 20 January 2010:
Katie Mitchell mangles another play. Someone should really get together a petition to have Ms Mitchell go and work overseas and stop inflicting on us this sort of mannered and inhuman staging. Also, can the NT start putting warning labels in bright red on the booking brochures 'Over-directed by KM' so I stop wasting my money buying tickets to her shows....
Creative
Ferdinand Bruckner (Author)
Travelex (Corporate Sponsor)
Prudential (Matinees) (Corporate Sponsor)
National Theatre (Producer)
Martin Crimp (Adaptation)
Katie Mitchell (Director)
Vicki Mortimer (Design)
John Bright (Costume)
Jon Clark (Lighting)
Gareth Fry (Sound)
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