The arrival of the musical Spring Awakening in the middle of snow-bound London is a real tonic and I was mightily relieved to discover last night that the British version is no less tender or touching than its Broadway original.

If anything, it’s even more tender and touching. I sat next to Jenny Harris, former associate at the NT, who thought the show was unrecognisably better than the early version she saw in the little Atlantic Theatre off-Broadway. On Broadway, the Eugene O’Neill had a wider, more open stage that brought the actors and music right into the auditorium.

The Lyric Hammersmith’s not like that, more buttoned up, but in a curious way this suited the mood of adolescent break out in the songs and staging. And there’s the most wonderful neon strip light show playing round the rococo Victorian balconies, a brilliant emblem for the mix of nineteenth century Expressionism and indie rock music.

Getting around town has been a bit of a problem these past few days with Boris Johnson’s London transport system dismally failing to keep the show on the road.

Buses were withdrawn altogether on the first night of the big freeze. Tube trains have been unreliable. Worst of all, roads and pavements simply haven’t been gritted or swept. And it’s not as if they didn’t have full notice. The weather was predicted days before it happened. 

Still, Spring Awakening may signal the green shoots of recovery and even as I write this the sun shines forth, the sky is cerulean blue and the outdoors beckons in a good, non snowbally sort of a way.

There’s a great song in Spring Awakening called “My junk” in which sexual fantasy, or even masturbation, rubs up against, if that’s quite the right way of putting it, the stern authority of the adult world.

A boy in a locked room is shouted at by his father. How much longer does he need in there? Another boy is disciplined by his piano teacher while swimming in private thoughts of the lady’s heaving bosom. As the song unfolds, Sian Thomas as the teacher unbuttons her bodice and the boy buries his face in her cleavage.

It’s all in the mind, of course, not the face. This took me back to my own piano lessons as a boy when I was tutored by a buxom German mezzo soprano called Mrs Ruth O’Keeffe who was magnificently endowed and a source of great solace and indeed speculation to many of her adolescent charges, me included.

I was a good pupil and became one of her favourites. I accompanied her on the piano when she sang at concerts. She gave me a present of a splendid old edition of Beethoven piano sonatas which I treasure to this day. And that’s as far as it went. From the age of ten to fifteen I was both terrified of her and besotted with an idea of her. I don’t think she knew.

And now you know why I understand Spring Awakening so well.  Much better now, in fact, after seeing this musical version, than I did back in 1968 when I played one of the boys in a student production at Oxford. We used a heavily bowdlerised translation of Wedekind’s play. And we had no songs, or piano teachers, to keep us abreast of the inner meaning.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.