Spring Awakening is in the Air
It is very good news that the Broadway musical version of Spring Awakening is coming to the Lyric Hammersmith next year, although they will have to build out the stage and break down the proscenium to recreate the right atmosphere.
The musical is simply sensational, the best rock musical theatre piece since Rent and, before that, Hair. When I saw the show on Broadway last year it had not yet won eleven Tonys and had fully preserved its rough and tumble off-Broadway character.
Frank Wedekind’s original 1891 lyrical shocker of adolescence, sexual repression, masturbation and overbearing schoolteachers comes to the stage in Oxford next week courtesy of the OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with beautiful young temptress Anna Popplewell, a film star undergraduate (she is appearing in the Narnia films), playing Wendla Bergman.
Forty years ago, the same play was given on the same stage — and I was in it, typecast, naturally, as one of the wankers in the dormitory! Not the OUDS, but the ETC, the Experimental Theatre Club, presented that production at the Playhouse.
The cast included the television historian Michael Wood, the Times journalist Alan Franks and the novelist Nigel Williams. The director was the children’s laureate Michael Rosen, and a damned good director he was, too.
We must have been performing a censored version, but it didn’t feel like it, and it certainly got up the nose big time of the remarkable but also remarkably staid Playhouse administrator, the late Elizabeth Sweeting.
We used the translation prepared by Thomas Osborn for the Royal Court’s club premiere in 1963. The play was obviously banned by the Lord Chamberlain — principally because of all the masturbatiuon, so the “solo entertainment” song in the current musical is a delightful, overdue dig at moralising authority — but he later licensed a censored text for a full Royal Court premiere in 1965.
Since then, the Court has presented an Activists Youth Group production in 1977 in the Edward Bond version first directed by Bill Bryden at the National Theatre in 1974, and that is the text in Oxford next week.
I’ve recently been reading Wedekind’s memoir, Diary of an Erotic Life, which recounts the wonderfully hedonistic life he led in Berlin, Munich and Paris in between writing his plays and satires.
He certainly knew how to enjoy himself, and the diary is littered with nights at the cabaret — Wedekind was both perfomer himself and an insatiable theatre-goer — that invariably ended with an intimate encounter in the wings, or back at his apartment.
He rarely rose before noon and then went and sat in a cafe before preparing himself for the night’s adventures: “It would seem that I’ve fallen in love with the fat little blonde dancer at the Moulin Rouge. I’ve been dreaming of her all week. At the very thought of her I can’t help sticking out my tongue.” Ooh-la-la, Fifi!
October 16th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Remarkably staid! Elizabeth Sweeting! You did not know her. I believe I did: she was my tutor and we remained close for the rest of her life. I remember that Spring Awakening too, of course.