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Seminal work still has a voice
Awakening: Melchior Gabor (David McLaughlin) and Wendla Bergman (Gabrielle Dempsey) Spring Awakening Icarus Theatre Collective The Theatre, Chipping Norton
A COLLEAGUE
made a rather incisive comment to me about
Spring Awakening.
‘I suppose plays that are so obviously ahead of their time,' he
observed, ‘are often the quickest to date.' It never occurred to me
that this might be true of Frank Wedekind's wonderful, seminal play
(1890-91; not staged till 1906, in Berlin by Max Reinhardt) about
cramped youth growing up in Bismarckian Germany but feeling its way to a
fin-de-siècle
or late 20th
century morality: a morality that found a place for natural instincts
and common sense. I wonder if the issue is about age. In Max
Lewendel's beautifully observed, trenchant staging, Icarus Theatre
Collective's cast of eight (Icarus are currently touring Spring
Awakening alongside Romeo and Juliet) were, with one
exception, 20-something youngsters, acting the role of what appeared
like 16 or 17 year olds. All the personae are victims. The
overlarded word abuse might be apt in some cases. But their main abuser
is life itself. Wedekind has them younger. The pregnant Wendla
(Gabrielle Dempsey), doomed victim of an unseen abortionist (whose
ominous knock on the Bergman's front door is a final turning point) is
13 turning 14; the philosophical Melchior, through the prism of whose
intellect the play's events are largely viewed, catechised and summed
up, is 14 too; and so, presumably, is his screwed-up, still huggably
naîve young friend Moritz (exquisitely personified by Christopher
Smart). Hans (Johannes or Hänchen, Kaiden
Dubois), sampling the delights of masturbation over an erotic postcard,
and embarking on gay first infatuation with his much-kissed chum Ernst
(Smart again, in some well-judged if ironic doubling of roles) is a
classmate of both. An attractive performer in more senses than one,
Dubois is Icarus's Romeo. Worth seeking out.
This is sex for Year Nines. Perhaps, to recover
the impact it had before the First World War, this play needs to be
acted by children (several youth theatre productions have been attempted
recently). Certainly that would be possible on radio. Wedekind's
criminals are the grown ups, presented in a slightly too Expressionist
Gymnasium staff meeting where adulthood is not examined but
sneered at and pelted: as with, say, Peter Maxwell Davies's like-minded
opera Resurrection (written, as it happens, for Germany), the
target is authority of any kind. Nietzsche used to parody those same hide-bound,
rule-enervated school institutions of his day (parallels with our own
post-Baker or Govian curriculum interference); and likewise Remarque at
the start of All Quiet on the Western Front; but Nietzsche
recognised the huge good they did, too. Life serves up a mixed bag. Max Lewendel's production is played out on an
imaginative dark set (no separate design acknowledgment) in which what
looks like an everted Golgotha cross – apt for Wendla and Moritz yet a
symbol for all of them - though it could be a smashed-up railway track
that is just waiting for a collision. Various bits of clutter are pulled on and off,
the cast being dab hands at scene-shifting. It is not an impeccable
staging (whenever was there one, of anything?). Yet it is next best:
nigh-on faultless. This cast is quite superb. I looked for more
definition, more structured individuality, more salient details of
characterisation, from David McLaughlin's Melchior. Romeo and Juliet's
Mercutio – a not wholly dissimilar role – McLaughlin is a bit like Jamie
Parker's Scripps in Alan Bennett's The History Boys: the shrewd
observer, standing somewhat apart from events; yet integral too. But because Melchior is in a sense ageless, his
reading is in many senses right. He speaks well, does irony as well as
he does kindness and empathy, and his sheer strength of character –
albeit wobbly at the crucial moments, as at the end where he is torn
between a luring corpse (‘kill yourself too') and a mystery (‘become an
adult; it is at least an option') – shines through.
One of the least satisfactory scenes comes just
before the interval. It is the rape of Wendla, who a few minutes earlier
has been reaching out, in a sado-masochistic exchange that stands for
sexual come-on, to urge Melchior to beat her. It is snatched – such
things are – but on a cramped bunk bed which is maybe not a bed, also a
bit botched; and set just a little too far stage left. Does she want it?
No, she says. But what does she mean? True, the rape – with its consequences - is meant
to be Spring Awakening's biggest puzzle. Does he, or doesn't he?
And is it really a defilement? Here, he goes to it with a will. By the
end, when confronted by the Strindberg-like Masked Man (Zachary Holton)
originally played by Wedekind himself, and having experienced the nasty
bullying and collective onanistic romps of a Reformatory, Melchior is
still trying to work out the morality in his head. As the survivor, he will take this confusion into
the future. As an adult, he will most likely resolve and outgrow it; but
will do so by recognising that some things in life are too finely
balanced to be soluble. Scepticism will have to cohabit with and/or make
concessions to decision-making. Zachary Holton's presence – first as angry
parent, then as mysterious hovering presence – is a slightly awkward
one. One fluffed entry didn't help, but he moves awkwardly, speaks
admirably and (here) impresses little. The difference in age seems
awkward: the role needs no antiquated sage, but a strange, philosophic
kind of postgrad. But I'd like to see him as Capulet on tour – a
role that would fit him perfectly. A bit like the Bishop of London, he
could also make a superb Friar Laurence. A veteran of the Scottish Play
- Duncan, Siward, Old Man, he is cut out for all three. But the role
that would test him, and that someone owes him, is the Porter. One of the girls – Perlam or Barrett (or a Mercutio type: Nicol Williamson, say) might have characterised the Masked Man, this kind of Ibsen escapee, far better. For the remainder of the cast are, one and all, magnificent. Gemma Barrett's Frau Bergman (Wendla's
all-too-proper, if put-upon mum, a kind of domestic cipher) caught my
eye and ear from the start: wonderfully, arrestingly spoken (maybe Voice
Coach Emma Vane's work on her Romeo and Juliet Nurse has paid
off; but she sounds a natural), with richly, amusingly expressive
features, Barrett excelled all evening (including as a particularly
nauseating staff member). She has range and depth. Gabrielle Dempsey (Wendla) came closest to
suggesting the very young age of these ill-fated participants. Whatever
her years, we can believe her confusion about pregnancy (storks, and
presumably Father Christmas, are still de rigueur in the Bergman
household; her mother is determined she shall remain a child – perhaps
understandably, 12/13 being the cusp): the only surprise, perhaps, is
that she has it thrust upon her (literally, by Melchior's own confused
priapic assault (perhaps little Hans's should not have been the only
organ on show), which she strives, or part-strives, to resist), rather
than actively, eagerly if naïvely desires it.
This was a beautifully gauged, deep performance
from an actress laden with charisma and sensitivity. Georgina Periam as Melchior's mother, Frau Gabor,
the one adult who comes near to an understanding (hence pilloried by
Holton's merciless, self-satisfied father, his much more impressive
role) was a joy to watch all evening. The set-piece scene where she writes to Moritz (‘Lieber
Herr Stiefel…' - he being onstage, aloft – near-crucified – throughout,
received letter in hand), was possibly – along with every word uttered
by Moritz - this production's masterpiece: as poignant as Tatyana's
gut-wrenching letter scene from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Nicole Anderson has the bit roles, but impressed,
especially in the (to a degree) maturer Ilse's more confident
assertions. She, too, offers a path to sanity. (In one brief sequence
Anderson appears, touchingly, as a not unperceptive little sister, Thea).
Appropriately, she is Icarus Theatre's Juliet on the current tour. That leaves Moritz. Lichfield-born,
Birmingham-trained Christopher Smart (how apt a name, when madness
beckons) is the undoubted star of the show. The range of faces, of
wide-eyed amazement or and face-twisting puzzlement, the bursts of
explosive enthusiasm, confused frustration and deep-ingrained pessimism,
reveal an actor of quite terrific range. Endlessly studious Stiefel junior is a sexual as
well as intellectual ingénu. One feels that if only he could have
shared his seed with Hans or Ernst, or been inducted by Ilse, some of
the tensions might have lifted. Smart's Moritz has zeal in plenty, is a
dutiful and presumably fledgling scholar who quotes the need to prepify
or revise every time a life experience threatens; yet is, like Moritz, a
genuine seeker. And it is he who will commit suicide before he even
reaches his GCSEs or a shared orgasm: Moritz becomes precisely the
headless man of his dream, early in the play. And that is the tragedy of it: not only are they,
children and parents alike, headless, whether through callow unreadiness
or mindless conformity or simple self-mutilation (though Melchior keeps
his, and strugglingly emerges the real sage of the show); but so are all
of us. We have scant hope of solving life's riddles (religion is a
salient one, shifting moralities another), however much astronomers and
psychologists and life's other cryptographers can tell us. Moritz's
headlessness is a symbol of us all. With Frühlings Erwachen, some 20 years
before Expressionism took off (and what they termed Stationendramen:
a kind of Golgotha for the stage, which is what Lewendel's testing,
thought-provoking and thought-through presentation conceivably evokes),
the 27-year-old Frank Wedekind, the source of Berg's Lulu
(shortly to be toured to Birmingham's Hippodrome), has succeeded in
writing a masterpiece, flawed yet sensationally ahead of its times, in
which every character is a Jedermann. Or is that what plays do?
Nonetheless, no mean feat. 24-01-13 Roderic Dunnett Midland dates
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