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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Touching tale of coming of age
Protecting the lovers: The encircling chorus in the Act I climax Spring Awakening – The Musical
***** SPRING
Awakening is a show it is difficult, in
a sense, to get wrong. With the tensions of adolescence, sexual and
intellectual, played out in all their glory, Frank Wedekind's
way-ahead-of-its-time daring play (Frühlings
Erwachen,
1890-1) has immediacy, directness and daring. Provided you can stomach
its blatancy, it hits the solar plexus. But it is also
infernally tricky to pull off: not only to explore lucidly those
fledgling philosophical musings, on a par with Musil's
Young Torless;
but (here) to import the informality of another idiom, the Musical, sung
and chanted, prevent it becoming too banal and set it alongside the
tortured internal battles of these young, vulnerable souls poised
curiously between joy and agony, hope and despair, life and death.
Does The (real) adults first. The two people above all
on whom these gamins relied for their triumph were director Natalie
Diddams, head of Royal and Derngate's Youth Theatre, who got totally and
utterly under and inside the Wedekind's dark, almost Brothers Grimm-like
morality tale and drew from her charges not dross, but gold.
Diddams' introductory note gives an idea of her
perception of this acutely philosophical, terse and tense play, and
exemplifies perfectly the approach she and her assistant director
Rebecca Kilby-Smith took in piecing together what is, for all its
unevennesses, a masterpiece of the stage; a play that belongs up there
with Ibsen:
‘Its portrayal of teenage love is not That ‘always should be' is significant, and is indeed Wedekind's point.
And the young ones, feisty members of the Royal
and Derngate's Youth Musical Theatre, duly blossomed. There are distinct
lead roles (Wendla, Melchior, Moritz), plus problematic parents – all
played, and sung, by young people - but Natalie Diddams contrived to
share the dramatic honours widely around the ensemble. It works
wonderfully, both textually and musically (the spoken enunciation was,
almost without exception, exemplary); and from her Spring Awakening
ensemble she generates the most vivid teamwork: the excitement, the
sympathy, the mutual support engendered in and out of the classroom
shines out.
This play is a bit like scapegoatism in reverse: when one suffers, all suffer. (Conversely, Frau Gabor makes an allusion to the scapegoat principle in direct relation to the Education system in Act III scene iii of the play). Instead of hope and optimism, this collective dream of an 1890s generation would instead yield two horrors: the Great War, in which these families and these school age youngsters' immediate successors would all have been embroiled; and Hitlerism. Brett Mason is magisterial as Melchior Gabor,
whose passion brings disgrace but who is in fact the cleverest, or,
tensions surmounted, on the way to being the wisest adult of all.
Mason's Angsts are writ large; yet this performance is so
distinguished because he reins Melchior in: thoughtful intensity is
etched upon his fretful, ruddy face. ‘Nothing is OK (he is told) unless
it's written in the Bible. Still, I know to trust my own mind'. Personal
conscience: the key to it all. Pure subversion, in The Kaiser's 1890s. These children, for so they are, are not
seventeen-plus, but all aged 14 or 15. The test for the youngest, the
pretty Wendla Bergman (Nicole Read), contemplating her innocence at the
start, who finds herself pregnant (by Melchior) when just turning
14 and wholly unconversant with the implications of sex, is to make the
girl believably that young.
I praised Gabrielle Dempsey, who played Wendla in
the splendid Icarus Theatre Collective's currently touring production
(with Romeo and Juliet, appropriately: www.icarustheatre.org),
for just that. But The beautiful purity of it all – though Natalie's
production (and perhaps the Musical treatment) avoided making Melchior
the young teenage rapist Icarus chose to do (in Wedekind the jury is
out) – was celebrated, par excellence, by her brilliant conceit
of having the entire chorus gather round the embracing duo, a kind of
vulnerable Hansel and Gretel, like watching young animals or birds:
hence, amid falling wintry leaves (their coupling coincides with the
nativity Christingle service, surely another symbol), it became a moment
of mystery and wonderment, a profoundly expressive moment of
transfigured innocence. That was just one of this production's wonderful
touches. Take another: the magnificent letter scene – shades of
Tatyana's in Tchaikovsky and Pushkin - where Melchior's mother (Katy
Sturgess) warns Moritz, for his own good, not to take crazy risks with
his sanity and future. Sturgess was just superb in this: her slow
self-dictation was a classic of theatre.
Or take Danny Brown's memorable appearances as
steely Headmaster Knochenbruch: strict, domineering yet somehow almost
in danger of giving the adults some humanity: he looks swayable. A
person, not a bureaucrat. We never see, in the Musical the
ultra-Expressionistic (and frankly silly) scene where a mass staff
meeting erupts with disgusted condemnation. But the three lady members
of staff we did see – Daisy Bowles's secretarial Frau Knuppeldick not
least, and all endowed with ghastly German knickerbocker-names funnily
adapted from Wedekind's origina - were splendidly ghoulish or (Katy
Sturgess's near-groping piano teacher) tentatively lusty; and Charlotte
Walter's Lutheran Pastor iced the cake with a deliciously ghastly
moralising sermon. Matthew Parsons' bumbling, sensitive, studious
Moritz struck a remarkable chord. Already a touch gawky, not bright
enough to be nerdy, yet always enquiring like a belated five or nine
year old, Moritz careers from one confusion to another. The scene where
Melchior gives him a breakneck sex lesson, pored-over illustrations and
all, is one treat; but Parsons makes us see very early on the character
failings – or strengths – that will lead Moritz to turn his gun on
himself. A slightly gabbly, volatile, immature mother (Megan Swan)
doubtless took a toll. Moritz's references to ghoulish dreams and
severed heads are – well – Freudian: premonitory, disturbing.
Wedekind depicts Moritz as neurotic; Parsons does
it like a natural. Moritz is a Melchior in reverse: from youthful
optimist he is descending into the depths. Melchior has already reached
the doldrums, but will re-arise to make his peace with an unkind world:
one thing this Musical version, with its (apparent) axing of the
mysterious Masked Man (in German, ‘Der vermummte Herr'), who
intervenes to save Melchior from embracing death along with his friend.
Melchior picks up the glove cast before him: poised on the edge of
annihilation, he survives. Then there's Stephen Bennett's gentle,
beautifully observed Hanschen, faded photograph in one hand, rampant
prick in the other, fretfully wanking (a friend berated me for calling
it ‘self-abuse' once in a review: ‘That's like ‘polluting': you typify
exactly what Wedekind is attacking'). By the time we find little Hans's
propensity, or at least his emotional learning curve, is currently gay
(a touching, not too tentative kiss with the equally inexperienced Ernst
- Michael Ryan), his outlook has changed: no guilt, only radiant
Romanticism and tenderness; not self-abuse, but joyous self-belief).
The way a trio of girls, spirit-like, hover over
Hans and Ernst during this woodland idyll is quite beautiful, mirroring
the exquisite Act I (literal) climax with Melchior and Wendla. It's a
touching performance from Bennett, whose input into to the group scenes
also is tremendous. Described as an ‘actor, dancer, musical theatre
performer and singer' (tenor), and now studying for a BTEC Extended
Diploma in Musical Theatre at Northampton, a dramatic career hopefully
in mind, Bennett has his own revealing listing at
www.starnow.co.uk
(rather a good site, incidentally). But the entire line-up of boys, without
exception, comes up trumps: they execute each move, many of them awkward
and demanding in the small oblong dancefloor of the Derngate's
Underground space, to perfection: the discipline of these young rebels
is (paradoxically) superb: indeed they're the kind of clever,
hardworking, repressedly impudent, not quite lippy class one would long
to teach. Headmaster Knochenbruch (Danny Brown) and his fawning secretary-deputy Fraülein Knuppeldick (Daisy Bowles) Melchior has been despatched to the Reformatory
by his vile advocate father (Ryan McLean, mirroring the stiffness of the
character – ‘the increasing sensuality of these liberal minded times',
which sounds just like our own age; or even worse, from the playscript,
‘Whoever can write what Melchior wrote must be contaminated in his
innermost core. The marrow is affected. It shows that rare spiritual
corruption we lawyers call “moral insanity”) You can hear Nazism just
round the corner. Indeed the passing scene where Melchior is beaten up
at the Reformatory is surprisingly effective: nasty little pieces of
work, these dodgy kids. Hitlerjugend in the making. The girls are, if it's possible, even better: all
a-twitter with the joys of Spring, blossoming, opening their ears and
minds to new discovery. Acquiring a new shrewdness, on the threshold of
sophistication as well as physical, though not yet emotional, maturity.
These young teenagers were all so believable. Wendla's friend
Martha Bessel (Bethany Coulson), victim of violent beating that
anticipates Wendla's submissive, not quite kinky desire to have Melchior
beat her (a prelude to the virtual ‘rape'), was outstanding. Gathered
round Wendla's sad little grave, they are all heart-rending; just as
Melchior is when he realises he will not, now, ‘build a better world for
our child'. To call this production moving would be a
ridiculous understatement. And when it came to the Musical aspect,
nursed on by Egerton and his gifted team, the musicians shone: above all
his wonderfully sensitive violinist, with overtones of folk timbres,
Romanian-born Horia Vacarescu. Clear star, Vacarescu studied at Both young guitarists, Dan Johnson and Mason
Tomlin, played distinctively (I was next to them), though Egerton could
perhaps have given them slightly more distinctive roles: they were a
little keyboard-dominated. One other small weakness in the score – some
might see it conversely as a strength – is the constant, albeit, gentle,
instrumental doubling of the vocal lines. These (I assume) fifth, lower
and upper sixth formers have the musical assurance to cope without that.
In a full-scale rock musical (which is what this is, in other hands) one
might expect just that. But here, it seemed – well, overcautious, and
just fractionally intrusive.
Far more effective, for example, was Moritz's
violent outburst over double-stopped violin (in near falsetto as he
first toys with the pistol), or the instrument's independent descant
line to accompany Ilse: ideally conceived and beautifully enacted.
Moritz's soft song or reprise as a (supposedly headless) corpse hovering
in the graveyard, was another moment when the music got it spot on,
though visually his transformation was fudged.
Librettist/Lyricist Steven Sater's famous
two-finger-wielding number ‘Totally F*ucked' (‘There's a moment you
know…you're fucked…. Man, you're fucked if you just freeze up'), a
rather warming trio/quartet for Melchior, Georg, Hans and spoken Otto,
is gloriously daring, and brilliantly enunciated, not just by them but
by the chorus when all the others join in with their derisive ‘blah
blahs's (more like ‘hear, hear's). Such solidarity. All, it would seem,
are f**ked. The arrivals of the midwife and abortionist are
suitably grim and ghastly. Melissa McCullough's (Frau Bergman's) ‘Is it
safe?' is loaded enough, pathetic enough, to make you burst out crying.
But it isn't just that it isn't: this play, or musical, poses the
real question about life itself. Is life safe?
The character Ilse is rather important to this
play. She is a free spirit: how she got there, one may surmise:
premature sex, flightiness, childhood abuse, a depressive tendency
overcome, indifference, amorality, an experience of life the others
haven't had. The choice – one need not make one – is endless. Hannah
Saxton needed to sing out a little more: but her own outburst to the
prudish Moritz, ‘You know when you finally wake up I'll be lying on some
trash heap', and Moritz's lovely, guilty ‘O God, all I had to say is
Yes', is wonderful.
Ilse's costuming – bright reds, in stark contrast
to the rest – really underlined her social and emotional ‘otherness'.
The boys' and girls' in-school and out of school attire – inspiredly
selected from the Royal and Derngate's treasure trove of period costumes
– was a visual joy. This looked nothing like weedy period drama. The
subtlest of understated colours, with a plethora of culotted grey
flannel-like material and preening or nonchalant caps for the boys, and
an array of sensitive turn-of-the century dresses and pinnies for the
girls, looked quite wonderful. And – this doesn't always follow - they
wore them wonderfully, too. The mainly woodland set (by Lucy Read) is
beautifully understated and sinuously evocative. Tendrils of leafless
tree, like an incipient wisteria, ivied their way across the ceiling;
hence the miraculous fall of brown-turned leaves at the end of Part I.
Scattered stumps suggest perhaps two things: growing potential; and
stunted hope; their similarity to severed necks (Moritz's obsession –
and destiny) only added to the creepiness. This stylish Shakespearian
spinney supplies a haunt of freedom, where youth can be youth and adults
cannot penetrate, where magic can happen and experimentation is not
condemned.
Particularly effective, conversely, was the long
mirror in which Wendla gazes at her young body, poised to burst into
womanhood. The mirror remains onstage, exterior as well as interior,
gazed on, dodged or leered into by chorus and principals. It's the thing
that reflects youth to itself; but it also watches an unkind world with
a critical eye: it whispers the truth to you and me. The cast's singing is a treat: one early song
from the boys, at a lively allegro, stood out; the girls' singing was
superlative: bang in tune, and with some lovely voices to boot. It's
true, the words of the lyrics – which are not bad – didn't always
project clearly (the book, and its adaptation into short vignettes of,
say, the headmaster scenes, felt ingenious). But on musical grounds
alone, these buoyant youngsters could have made a perfect chamber
ensemble, or Lutheran Domchor. As Melchior notes to the dead Moritz,
‘You spend your whole life running from the Church and you end up in a
graveyard'. Quite so. One of life's frequent ironies. The Melchior-Wendla-Moritz ensemble (duet, then
trio) near the end (‘I'll never let them go….') and its successor with
cloying, predictable rhymes (‘heaven…forgiven') are both a bit corny
musically, a dramatic droop (a bit like those American ‘family unit'
film endings); though the offbeat, muttered responses of Parsons' Moritz
(‘Not gone') are rather effective.
But at the close, the fusion of girls and boys' choruses, led by Coulson's Martha and Saxton's Ilse, and culminating in a challenging final block (the last of many beautifully managed groupings), was climactic. And how heartening to be able to marvel, in these gifted and precious performances, at a musical where the music does not, as it so easily might, milk the words for thin, sickly emotion. Roderic Dunnett |
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patronizing but beautifully, painfully honest, and will hopefully make
an adult audience reconsider its attitudes towards teenage sexuality…The
play is ultimately hopeful, embodying that desire for change that always
has been – and always should be – the experience of being young. Not
just honest, then, but creatively subversive.'
