Spring Awakening, Almeida Theatre, review: revival brings the shock of the old to a new generation

Spring Awakening, both the 1891 play (Frühlings Erwachen) by Frank Wedekind and this, the 2006 American musical based on it, is – overtly and explicitly – about the pains of youth.

With its scenes of burgeoning self-discovery, masturbation, physical intimacy – opposite sex, same sex – teenage suicide and a backstreet abortion, the play was an instant cause célèbre. It struggled – much like its juvenile characters – to find a space to be heard. The critic Eric Bentley described it as “one of the most censored of all plays”.

The story retains its power to shock. It admiringly centres on a free-thinking schoolboy called Melchior and his bright but ignorant sweetheart – Wendla - whom he ruinously impregnates.

Ostensibly we’re now removed from the punitive landscape they inhabit, so riddled with inhibition and shame. Even so, these days, Spring Awakening seems obliged to come with trigger warnings. Rupert Goold’s first major revival of the musical in London has an online advisory, flagging such upsets as the smoking of “real cigarettes”. That’s an indictment of our mollycoddling age and a killing irony: the work celebrates its protagonists’ fortitude even as they’re crushed. Wedekind understood that “protecting” the young was often for their fearful elders’ benefit.

How far have we really come from the pressurised climate in which the playwright and his peer-group miserably sweltered? The conceit of the musical, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and score by Duncan Sheik, is to retain period trappings for the main action, but bust free from the original in the songs, deploying contemporary indie rock and folk.

On the West End in 2009, not everyone was convinced by that anachronistic dissonance; despite critical plaudits, and later winning four Olivier Awards, the West End transfer run closed early. In this more intimate incarnation, the conceptual strangeness raises questions: doesn’t it diminish the adolescents’ despair if they have recourse to modes of liberated self-expression that weren’t within their generation’s grasp? “You’re f---ed all right…” runs the refrain in a particularly yobbish-punkish anthem.

It’s almost too much. The success of Goold’s dreamlike staging, though, is to make the tactic enhance the mood of fevered confusion. We notice the artifice - the unreality of angst articulated in ways that resonate with us - yet grasp the natural modernity of the youngsters’ demands, the timelessness of their impulses. Wedekind was conceived in San Francisco and born in Hanover, so the musical has a weird biographical claim to its hybridity. Even so, Goold softens the American identity; the accents are British, and there’s less brash wielding of microphones this time. It all feels closer to home.

Boldly setting the action on a steep bank of steps (Miriam Buether designs), he and choreographer Lynne Page, with the assistance of video designer Finn Ross, create a gloomy, surreal, volatile milieu. Moments of despondent and melancholy calm give way to inspiring outbreaks of agile energetic activity. The boys first spring into view like jack-in-the-boxes, arranged in a vertical line for their emotionally and physically abusive Latin tutelage; later they bound about in fleet motions of fledgling machismo.

Their tightly drilled movement catches the comic embarrassment of dawning libidinal urges – there are synchronised, slow-rising buttocks and erratically violent pelvic jerks. But the evening also taps the quiet tenderness at the show’s heart.

During the song The Mirror-Blue Night, projected chalky markings magically undulate, making the solid world the ensemble are lying on swooningly liquid. When two boys declare their forbidden desire, Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea and Zheng Xi Yong lie upside down on the steps and slowly, hand in hand, slink down them, as if they’re defying gravity, like figures by Chagall.

Both Laurie Kynaston and Amara Okereke have just the right mixture of vulnerability, integrity and wilfulness as Melchior and Wendla, their “hayloft” encounter presented inside a sterile glass cubicle, as though she has infiltrated his bubble of isolation; his ardency is lent a quality of gentleness not predatory outrage.

Among an achingly young cast elsewhere, some making their debuts, Stuart Thompson impresses as the patriarchally and scholastically bullied Moritz, offered love but already too damaged to accept it and save himself. If this vision of a new generation bursting through gets snuffed out by this winter’s Covid ills, oh, what a waste - but also how Wedekindian.

Until Jan 22. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk