Sex in the Eighties in Spring Awakening

Deserving better: Melchior (Aneurin Barnard) and Wendla (Charlotte Wakefield)
10 April 2012

I was let down and left there by this multi-award winning Broadway show. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s seminal sex classic of the 1890s, it condemns a society where sexual education is off every syllabus. While adolescent boys get worked up about semen and girls, their opposite numbers know nothing of how babies come about. Since rock music speaks the language of liberation, modernity and protest, there’s an odd dissonance about the idea of exploiting this contemporary genre to convey a sense of the sexual fear and guilt of Wedekind’s late-Victorian teenagers.

Duncan Sheik’s American indie and pop rock music, most of it pleasant but quite unmemorable, exudes a sophistication and assurance that runs counter to the mood of these uptight, ignorant teenagers, with their prim Victorian costumes and grotesque styles: Moritz wears literally erect hair while another boy has plaited his to resemble donkey ears. Such songs as Totally F***, The Bitch of Living and Touch Me, which climaxes with a youth enthusiastically masturbating to a fantasy of Desdemona, veer towards the ridiculous. They all betray today’s rebellious, outspoken manners.

It is equally unfortunate that Michael Mayer’s production, adorned with blue neon lights and an ugly brickwalled set, leans towards caricature. Such authority/parental figures as Sian Thomas and Richard Cordery are rendered melodramatic rather than terrifying by these accomplished actors. Steven Sater’s unlovely lyrics, on the rare occcasions when the singers can be heard above the eloquent seven-strong band, aided by Mayer’s caricature-prone production, succeed in making absurd rather than sad the sexual growing pains of the show’s key figures: Charlotte Wakefield’s vulnerable Wendla who dies of a botched abortion, Aneurin Barnard’s charismatic Melchior expelled from school and Iwan Rheon’s infinitely poignant, isolated Moritz, who commits suicide, are variously victims of their puritanical and prejudiced times. These brilliantly promising young actors deserve better.

Yet Wakefield’s Wendla, eagerly exposing her buttocks to Melchior to be beaten — and hard, "You barely stroked me" — before floating upwards with him on a canopy while a chorus celebrate their canoodling and his premature ejaculating, smacks more of bad sex today than adolescent experimentation then. Similarly, Jamie Blackley’s Hanschen seduces the delicate Ernst with an incoherently sadistic song. A beautiful choral lament for the dead Moritz strikes the only authentic period note.
Until 14 March (0871 221 1722).

Spring Awakening
Lyric Hammersmith
Lyric Square, King Street, W6 0QL

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