Anya Reiss's update of Frank Wedekind's 1891 classic is a Nuffield, Headlong and West Yorkshire Playhouse co-production. I saw it at the Nuffield, which seems in good shape under new management. How pleasant to sit among a large and largely younger audience who were clearly enjoying themselves. Reiss's version is not a translation but a re-creation, moving Wedekind's radical piece about dawning sexual awareness to the contemporary world of sexting, cyber-bullying, and slut-shaming (a new one to me, but helpfully explained in the programme), alongside more perennial issues of rape, masturbation, abortion, suicide and coming to terms with homosexuality. I suppose a version that was simply a tame and reverential account of a classic would miss the point of the work, which is to provoke and expose matters which we parents would normally prefer to stay under the carpet. The whole production, 105 minutes without an interval, moved with great élan, in a trademark (how soon it becomes diminishingly familiar) Headlong style of digital projections, thumping soundtrack (which can be listened to in sequence on YouTube, a nice new production touch: I'm tapping my foot to Mickey Avalon's jolly number 'My Dick' as I write) and aggressive lighting effects.
While I was taken by the zing of the work (and struck in particular by the clear delivery of Aoife Duffin, Claudia Grant and Oliver Johnstone), niggling questions kept coming from another bit of the brain: why on earth had the translator kept the original German names, like Moritz and Melchior? (Christopher Hampton did the same with God of Carnage and Art, I remember: everyone is speaking in English and then suddenly they are talking abuut how many francs something costs or some kind of French biscuit. Is this a translator's convention?) And there was the odd odd locution: does anyone really call their teacher 'Mistress' these days? Some plot points seemed to be left over from the original era. I imagine there must be some horrible botched homemade abortions, but surely in 2014 a clinic would normally deal with it? And even given that young people are over-informed by the web and under-educated, some moments of naivety seemed hard to believe. The conclusion, with online answers to the question 'What's right and wrong' led us to the mystifying 'Live in the overlay'. Eh? Make what you want to do the same as what you should do is a stunningly nineteenth-century message in the context.
And still the niggles found their way through the pace and intensity, even leaving aside the painfully unavoidable fact that the actors are obviously not teenagers. The doubling of actors as parents was an ingenious way of economising on cast while making it look deliberate, and I suppose did point out a kind of cyclical pattern as each generation turns into the next. Yet I couldn't help wondering whether many teenagers would go in for this weird practice of pretending to be each others' parents, while the justificatory lines of 'She would say this about my clothes' seemed intrusive. And the starchy repression of Wedekind's world is, necessarily, missing from this account, leading to a lack of clear oppositional tension. I suppose the message that adults today are elsewhere, busy and indifferent, rather than actively countering youngsters' concerns, is a perfectly fair one though. But updates can easily expose essential differences between the world of the original work and today. In the age of Rihanna videos, the kind of awakening he was dealing with is probably a matter of pre-pubescence. Today I learned that a local student earns a few bob a male stripper with his mother's approval. And that's in southern Hampshire. It's hardly the Prussian Gymnasium.
But above all I wondered about the portrayal of teenagers. Writer Reiss says that at 27, she is already something like a generation out of kilter with the latest crop of teens, so that must make me, in my late forties, the old man of the mountains as far as youth issues are concerned. Yet I have met a good number of teenagers and they are not like this - or not just like this. Yes, there is of course a subterranean world played out online which I am mainly ignorant of, and no doubt much of what goes on would shock me, and the horrific stories of vulnerable young people driven to depression and suicide by the casual cruelty of online behaviour should not be diminished for a moment. Yet the fact remains that teens, or at least those I have met, are not solely and monomaniacally obsessed with sex. They read books, they have interests in things like art, music and history. I know children the age of the characters here who want to be therapists and child carers. I know some who sing in choirs, who form bands and play in pubs and love acting Shakespeare. And not one of the above examples is from a private school. Yet in the world of contemporary drama, from Skins to The In-Betweeners to this, teens are often typified along a few common denominators. There are surely other stories to be told.
Well, plays must have a focus and the issues this new Spring Awakening focusses on are undeniably important. Perhaps I was simply in the wrong mood. I yield to the judgment of younger audience members, clearly gripped by a play which spoke of their world and enthusiastic in their reception. And I'm glad to have the chance to see bold new work close by, even if I end up being grumpy about it.
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