What's On
Spring Awakening
29th April 2008 to 18th May 2008 - 7.30pm (no Monday performances)Venue: Studio
Company: N1 Theatre Company
Writer: Frank Wedekind in a translation by Edward Bond
Director: Pat Garrett
The year is 1891 - the setting, a small town in Germany - but how much has really changed?
'Spring Awakening', also known as 'The Children's Tragedy' has as much relevance today as it did when it was first written.
The Broadway musical of Spring Awakening is coming to London soon - don't miss the chance of seeing the original play on which it was based.
Programme Notes
Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced. "Spring Awakening" was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first unadulterated performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from the translation in this production by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pabl which was described in The Times as "Scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry."
Frank Wedekind (1864 - 1918) was a journalist, advertising manager, secretary to a circus, cabaret artiste, satirist, convict and actor as well as the author of twenty one plays, many of which reflect aspects of his extraordinary career. He himself paid for the publication of Spring Awakening. He was a key figure in the emergence of expressionist literature. In his plays, Wedekind employs grotesque fantasy and unconventional characters in order to attack the bourgeois ideals and hypocrisy of society. He was particularly concerned with sexual themes, and stressed the primacy of man's instincts.
Written in 1891 Spring Awakening, scandalized German society with its explicit and sardonic portrayal of a sexual coming of age. It was first performed in Germany in 1906where several of the scenes had to be cut before it could pass the censor. It was shown in New York in 1917 where it closed after one night amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. In England it was banned from public performance until 1963. For the better part of the twentieth century Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter-teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality-is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.
When Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening it was the first time in his life that he felt free. In every scene there is an element of autobiography but at the same time there is a panorama of the growth of adolescence. The individual problems of puberty, of adapting to the adult world, of the sacrifice of the needs of childhood, of frustration and of moments of happiness in both sexes. Melchior and Moritz are the two sides of Wedekinds' personality, shown trapped in the social cage he describes so brilliantly.
Having written the play when he was twenty six, Wedekind saw it staged for the first time when he was forty two and in the first performance, he himself played the role of the Masked Man. When he first attended rehearsals nine days into the production, he spoke of ''finding a really horrible tragedy in the grandest dramatic style. I tried to do the most I could to bring out the sense of humour, especially in the scenes with Wendla and in all the scenes with her mother as well as in the last scene. I believe that the play is more gripping the more harmless, sunny, laughing the performance''.
Wedekind's importance cannot be underestimated, when he died at the age of 51, Bertolt Brecht wrote 'without actually seeing him buried, I cannot conceive that he is dead. Like Tolstoy and Strindberg, he was one of the great educators of modern Europe'.
The continuing relevance of Spring Awakening can be seen in an article published on the front page of the Independent newspaper on March 11th 2008.
Why Are Children So Unhappy?
''Teachers are to take the extraordinary step of calling for an independent Royal Commission to investigate why so many of Britain's children are unhappy. The unprecedented move by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers follows a welter of evidence highlighting the fragile states of mind of many of the country's seven million primary and secondary school pupils.
ATL's agenda warns that "social dysfunction and family breakdown are damaging the educational attainment of children and the performance of schools and colleges", while a third speaks of the growing number of pupils being driven to suicide by "academic, social and peer pressure". The recent spate of teenage suicides in Bridgend, South Wales, is symptomatic of the unease felt by today's children''
So little has changed since Wedekind wrote his masterpiece in 1891.
