Spring Awakening – Stockwell Playhouse

Picture: Eliza Wilmot

Spring Awakening at Stockwell Playhouse, London.

Star rating: three stars ★★★✩✩

Spring Awakening The Musical is not easy. Adapted from Frank Wedekind’s scandalous 1891 original play, it’s a coming of age story with themes charting sexual frustration to eponymous awakening, societal pressures from school to home life, the conservation of innocence by the older generation, parental abuse and teen suicide.

It’s uncompromising, utterly liberal and angst-ridden, so a perfect choice for the British Theatre Academy’s up-and-coming company.

Director Dean Johnson’s production has brought the action slightly forward in time from its original puritanical provincial setting to a similarly oppressive totalitarian-tinged society. Evocative armbands segregate and identify characters as either male or female using traditional gender symbols, and school uniform consists of thick-soled work boots, utilitarian pinafores and boiler suits.

The statement is a bold one, but instantly recognisable through designer PJ McEvoy’s decisions. You immediately know where you are, the kind of people pulling the strings, and the consequences for interrupting the status quo.

This production works best at its most daring, with a few particular choices standing out. The physical inversion in casting elfin Max Harwood as the sexually knowledgeable Melchior and (comparatively) brick-outhouse broad James Knudsen as hapless, naive Moritz grants the characters a much-needed lease of life. Physicalising Melchior’s bookishness brilliantly dusts off his bizarrely popular casting as a dominant alpha male type, and the usual infantilising of Moritz is avoided through his re-imagining as a Steinbeck-esque gentle giant.

Elsewhere a new arc for sexually assured Hanschen (Jamie Heward) is implemented, bringing out a gender-fluidity that complements the character perfectly, and an unusually otherworldly Ilse (Ginnie Thompson) brings a real poignancy to her nostalgic interaction with a desperate Moritz.

However, despite a firm concept, the material, as always, feels more than a little uneven. Storytelling comes a distant third to the music and choreography, so much so that almost the entire synopsis, beat for beat, has been provided in the programme notes.

Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s music and lyrics contribute little of relevance to the piece, with only every third song or so managing to further the plot in any way. The insistence on pretty melody compromises the grit of what’s being depicted and often means these hard-hitting moments don’t land.

On paper Spring Awakening remains one of the most explicit and tragic stories still being regularly performed, but in practice it invariably ends up feeling tonally confused. Certain pivotal moments are wrung for melodrama, while early on another is lost in going for non-existent gags.

This being said, the 21-strong British Theatre Academy ensemble bursts with unbridled energy and commitment. For the most part, they seem to be most comfortable performing Matt Nicholson’s high-octane, envelope-pushing choreography and belting anthemic earworms like ‘Totally Fucked’ as if their lives depend on it. And anyone who can deliver those lyrics with a straight face should be highly commended.

Alex Chard