Spring Awakening

This unsuccessful reimagining of the oft-banned Frank Wedekind play transfers the story of a group of teenagers exploring their nascent sexual stirrings from its original setting in the turn-of-the-century Germany to 1950s England.

The controversial plot—featuring suicide, a botched miscarriage and child abuse—is a powerful one, but this clumsy production fails to deliver on practically every level. The actors use babyish voices better suited to infants than the rebelling teenagers they are supposedly portraying, giving a bizarre comic edge to the tragic tale.

The direction is deeply flawed, jumping between scenes and characters at a bewildering pace, making the narrative arc impossible to follow. Towards the end of the play there are two segments which seem to have only been included for shock value and inspire little but inappropriate giggles.

The play, at 60 minutes long, is too short to allow an audience the time to get to know any of the 12 characters in any depth, meaning there is little emotional resonance when tragedy strikes and the figure of death literally begins to stalk the stage. Meanwhile, the writing fails to put the plot into any kind of social context; a small note on the programme is the only indication of the era and that the play has been relocated to England seems to be illustrated only by the characters' accents.

With many of the play's themes as relevant today as they were when the play was written more than a century ago, this production is a real missed opportunity.