Spring Awakening is both a perfect choice of production for a cast of young actors, and a damned difficult one. Frank Wedekind looks into that inherent conflict of being a teenager – being treated as a child while having to face up to being an adult, burgeoning sexuality, excitement and despair.

It was so controversial that it was banned from the stage and it was almost 100 years before it was seen in its full form in English – we’re talking the 1970s.

What’s really extraordinary is that it feels like it could have been written today – covering as it does homosexuality, teenage suicide, masturbation, rape and abortion.  The students are all 14 and stuck in a provincial town, their parents are either over protective or indifferent, their teachers are self-obsessed and uncaring.

The contemporary feel to this play is also largely due to Willem Wasenaar’s direction, which is ‘heightened’ to the point of caricature overall.  It makes some scenes, like the ghastly teachers responding (or not) to a student’s suicide, an hilarious example of on-stage grotesqueness.  Very, very funny and well performed and directed. 

The downside is that we don’t feel that connected to the students and their individual tragedies and pain.  This is a missed opportunity. 

That said, the cast is fully committed to the production and their zest for it keeps the audience connected.

Great set – on real lawn, with the back of the stage one giant blackboard – both used to full effect.

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"I have just seen my friends do stuff I never want to see them do in real life," a shining-eyed 16 year-old girl says after the opening night. "That play is amazing. I’ll probably come again tomorrow."

Spring Awakening, written by German playwright Frank Wedekind in 1891, is a play every generation of adolescents should see (and their parents and teachers too, though maybe not at the same time). It dramatises the collision of raging hormones and fast-fusing synapses in 14 year-olds, warning of the dangers of withholding knowledge about what is natural and essential to human survival.

In a world controlled by moral authoritarian educators and fearfully ignorant parents, the ill-equipped teenagers have to deal with sex and sexuality, ‘self abuse’, physical (father-daughter) abuse, rape, pregnancy, abortion, fear of academic failure and suicide.

First produced in 1906 amid controversy that continued for decades, the English translation didn’t gain traction in America until 1958. (There had been a one-night stand in New York in 1917. When the Commissioner of Licenses judged it pornographic and tried to shut it down, Wedekind secured a Supreme Court injunction that allowed the production to proceed, but audiences were not attracted and it closed after just one performance). A musical version opened off-Broadway in May 2006, transferred to Broadway in December 2006 and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, winning eight.

Willem Wassenaar’s Long Cloud Youth Theatre production of Eric Bently’s English translation, designed by Daniel Williams, clothes the cast of 13 in striped private school blazers, white shorts, red ties and black shorts or skirts, and sets them on a vast lawn (actual Instant Lawn) backed by a huge ‘blackboard’ wall that is written and drawn on throughout. School desks and chairs begin in regimented ranks and get used creatively to suggest other settings.  

For some of the under-trained voices the space is an acoustic challenge, especially when they talk fast with all the dramatic urgency of youth. But their intelligent understanding of the play and clear subjective connection with the substance of each scene ensures the play’s essence comes through. At times, however, the apparent need to speed things along for fear a modern young audience may not last past 2½ hours (including interval) means important dramatic moments are not quite given their due.

The ensemble work is excellent, the militarily precision of some sequences offering a strong contrast to the chaos raging within the minds and bodies of the central characters. The transitions from naturalistic authenticity to broad expressionism for the more absurdist scenes are also well handled, especially where the bigness is rooted in emotional truth. Where shallow comic send-up is allowed to prevail, the inherent ‘debate’ loses some of its strength.

A great deal hinges on the performances of the three central characters and Tamara Jones (Wendla Bergman), Jack Buchanan (Melchior) and Ben Crawford (Moritz Stiefel) make the questing experiences, excitements, fears and dilemmas of their characters very real and compelling. In the support roles Ally Garret’s Mrs Gabor (Melchior’s mum) and Leon Wadham’s Man in a Mask deserve special mention.

But it’s the group effort that stands out most. I’ve seen turgid productions of Spring Awakening in the past and the fact that this company’s audience of peers, on opening night, were so hugely responsive proves they found the comedy and held their attention by exploring, exposing, questioning and celebrating the timeless truths immortalised in this extraordinary classic.
  

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