1991

Spring Awakening

by Frank Wedekind

State Theatre Company

Playhouse, April, 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is almost one hundred years to the day since Spring Awakening was written. It’s author was twenty-six at the time and he was writing as no-one had ever done before about sexual and social development in adolescence. Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was conceived in San Francisco, raised in Switzerland, and, in defiance of his cranky, autocratic, marxist father, was to become an altogether new kind of radical – one whose candour and astonishing example re-animated the German drama. Inspired by Buchner and Heine, Wedekind became a culture hero himself , especially for Bertold Brecht who wrote admiringly of him that his greatest work was his personality.

Certainly it is an exceptional personality that has the courage to broach the array of unmentionables canvassed in Spring Awakening. But the play is more than just a Hanoverian Diary of Adrian Mole, it is a work of great theatrical originality as well.

The State Theatre Company production, directed by Cath McKinnon  fully acknowledges the significance of the work -but, unfortunately, the result is too sepulchral. Wedekind himself noted that once people got over the idea that his play was pornographic they made it ponderous instead -“I believe the play is more gripping, the more harmless, sunny, laughing the performance,” he wrote. From Kathryn Sproul’s raised, grey marble-ish acting space to Mark Shelton’s chilly lighting  and the abstracted cadences of Ian McDonald’s piano and cello accompaniment, the State production succeeds in annotating the whalebone grip of Edwardian repression but forgets that there is a descant which gives the play both its purpose and its name.

The opening scene where the young Wendla is dressed by her mother, Frau Bergmann, is symptomatic of the problem. Performed in arty slow motion it highlights an unresolved  discrepancy between acting and decor. These events are occuring  in a time and place- the period costumes already tell us that- but they have been made unconvincingly generic. Without props or motifs or a flicker of colour the  actors arrive and disappear through trapdoors on a featureless stage. For them it is a constant  struggle  to humanise the space.

Wedekind’s play revolves around three young people in early adolescence -Wendla, whose mother, immobilised by prudery, is all stork and no information, Melchior, whose energetic sexual curiosity causes his own father to denounce him as a criminal and Moritz, whose grief at the absurdity of the world around him leads to suicide. Even this much of a thumbnail sketch suggests grand guignol but Wedekind is working in tragicomic dream play forms which get beyond melodrama. With a mix of comedy and satire, Spring Awakening seeks to liberate and lighten. There is admonition and blame but Wedekind has such purposeful vision that he sees the aberrations of his time as soon passing.

The State  production is so preoccupied with what has not changed in a hundred years that it has forgotten  the juice and joy that drives  Wedekind’s text. As I have said, the vacuity of the set denies any opportunity for social comment and vitiates, for instance, the Scarfe-like satire of the scene of Melchior’s inquisition by schoolmasters. Elsewhere the sensual physicality of the young people is difficult for both actors and audience to locate. The decision to emphasise the emptiness and morbidity of the milieu of the play comes close to anti-bourgeois cliche and is at the cost of its overall vitality.

All the same, it is a production with many strengths. There are fine performances – from Daphne Gray as Frau Bergmann, Peter Finlay as Herr Gabor, and Edwin Hodgeman as Dr Lemonade. Carmel McGlone is Chaplinesque as Prof Flyswatter and brings shading to Frau Gabor- although her careful German enunciation as the latter is oddly at variance with the often broad Australian accents of other players . Joey Kennedy, Ian Dixon and Geoff Revell again acquit well as do the many newcomers- including Alex Reid, as Wendla, shedding an initial stagey earnestness. Syd Brisbane and Alex Hulse play Melchior and Moritz, alter egos of the playwright and shadows of each other. Brisbane, always good value as a performer, seems less at ease with his task this time- although his scenes with Hulse are sensitive and generous.

Alex Hulse gives the production much of its strength and direction with a reading of Moritz that has enough Charlie Brown to prevent him becoming Siegfried. It is an intelligent, well-judged performance. Anyone who can make a plausible professional debut with his head tucked under his arm not only has plenty of nerve but knows an expressionist device when he sees one. Mind you,  so does Cath McKinnon, whose  direction  brings a sureness and comic nonchalance to the graveyard scene with Melchior, Moritz and The Masked Man, played by Bran Nue Dae’s Stephen Albert.

Spring Awakening is a strong choice for Come Out. It is a classic play which not only has plenty to say but with Edward Bond’s translation and Wedekind’s stage creativity, still speaks to us now. It is a pity that Kathryn Sproul was not tempted into satire, Ian McDonald into less lugubrious musicmaking and director Cath McKinnon into some green to match the grey.

“Rites and Wrongs” The Adelaide Review, No.88, May, 1991, pp.28-9.