{"id":737,"date":"2009-04-30T23:37:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T22:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp\/2009\/04\/wet_dreams_and_their_disconten.html"},"modified":"2009-04-30T23:37:03","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T22:37:03","slug":"wet_dreams_and_their_disconten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2009\/04\/wet_dreams_and_their_disconten.html","title":{"rendered":"Wet dreams and their discontents"},"content":{"rendered":"

A final bulletin from Berlin. Spring Awakening<\/a><\/em>, the American musical which triumphed on Broadway, has settled into London’s West End, so it seemed apt to see the play on which it’s based – Wedekind’s Fr\u00fchlings Erwachen<\/a><\/em>. The musical is snappily staged, but it smooths out a brilliantly disconcerting play which is all jagged edges. As I had hoped<\/a>, as produced by Claus Peymann at the Berliner Ensemble, it retains its potential to wound.
\nFor the 19th century, the divide between childhood and adulthood was absolute. Work and wedlock, especially, plunged the young abruptly from one state to the other. Our own culture privileges adolescence, an infinitely extendable period which combines grown up desires with a youthful retreat from responsibility. In the musical, the emo numbers, breaking out of formal dialogue scenes, represent this arena of adolescence. For Peymann’s cast, this in-between state is more perplexing – the boys especially, in their shorts and calf-length socks, seemed inappropriately marooned in childhood. All those knees are displayed like a vanished index of childhood.
\nThe adolescent confusion scrawls over a memorably stark set by Achim Freyer. Swivelling black and white panels rotate to carve up the space – closing to form a high wall or opening to reveal a wider world through the slats. They offer moments of release – we first see schoolboy protagonists Melchior and Moritz rushing through them as if cresting the spars of a threshing machine.
\nWhat else does the play offer? Little comfort, as you’ll see after the click:<\/em><\/p>\n


\nAlthough the play kicks against the constricting bourgeois home, there is no naturalistic clutter here. We see very few props (though there’s a heavily sugared fluted ring sponge). Everything is black and white – even schoolbooks have immaculate white covers – except for isolated splashes of colour like leafy branches or the red flowers that drop into a boy’s grave (pointing, perhaps, to the poppy fields of the first world war). The austere staging has no music, but a chill wind blows through it, a sound of gathering wind and storm.
\nThe Berliner Ensemble’s theatre certainly focuses attention on actors – it fosters intimacy. Peymann exploits this quality, having Melchior and Moritz perch on the very front of the stage to discuss wet dreams and their discontents, sharing their confusion with the audience, bringing home that state of teenage ferment. Melchior is the dangerously bright one, while Moritz finds everything difficult. The adult world offers few signposts when it comes to dealing with feelings, dealing with girls – Melchior’s friendship with Wendla also spills into dangerous territory for which they don’t have enough words.
\nSabin Tambrea’s lanky Melchior has a keen profile, hair slickly parted to the side. He’s the scythe to his friend Moritz’s sponge – Lukas R\u00fcppel is a soft redhead, turning crimson and white with effort and shame. Humiliated at school, he is the play’s first victim, and there’s something so poignant about him, a young man who lives and dies in short trousers.
\nThe musical softens Melchior’s relationship with Wendla – composer Duncan Sheik told me that they couldn’t envisage as their hero ‘a bratty kid who rapes a girl.’<\/a> It feels like a fudge. The scene in which Wendla urges Melchior to whip her may begin in laughter but soon becomes excessive – a brutal punching as the set panels turn blood red. However questing Melchior’s mind, his emotions are unable to keep pace. The later scene in which Wendla becomes pregnant is unequivocally rape, despite its brief, tender aftermath – Peymann snaps the lights off and changes scene before we get a chance to become wistful.
\nWendla has an affectionate, teasing relationship with her mother, who coaxes and fusses and is driven to distraction. She is wholly unequipped to explain the facts of life to her persistent daughter. Despite shoving Wendla’s head under her apron and stumbling towards an explanation of adult love, she balks at her sheer inadequacy for the task. She can’t deal calmly with the girl’s pregnancy because she can barely acknowledge the idea. Similarly, Melchior’s liberal mother is visibly careworn with the effort to do the right thing, and we only see Moritz’s father at the boy’s funeral, sobbing inconsolably like Stan Laurel, ludicrous in grief.
\nPeymann cuts the play’s early scenes with the teachers, making the flustered parents as much victims of their culture as are their kids. When the school governors do appear in the second act it is as callous grotesques, slathered with white greasepaint, smutched with ashy black – as if adulthood has all but mummified them. Plinths attached to their shoes lend an unjustified monumental authority; they are nonetheless all too ready to break into schoolyard jeering.
\nPlanning to see the production? Look away now, because there’s a spoiler coming. Just before the final scene, the set collapses into shards, a confusion of gravestones on the wide, deep stage. Here Melchior meets a mysterious masked man (a figure scrapped in the musical’s vapid ending). He was played by Wedekind in the first production, and here by another playwright, Manfred Karge<\/a> (best known in Britain for two plays staged here in the 1980s – Man to Man<\/em>, which featured Tilda Swinton, and The Conquest of the South Pole<\/em>). Karge makes a disconcertingly urbane figure, a scarlet-lined coat, flower in his buttonhole, mask and cane. This is the most sophisticated – over-sophisticated, even – vision of adulthood that we’ve yet seen. Is this the future towards which Melchior is stumbling? Are there any other options? The Ensemble’s comfortless production offers little cause for optimism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A final bulletin from Berlin. Spring Awakening, the American musical which triumphed on Broadway, has settled into London’s West End, so it seemed apt to see the play on which it’s based – Wedekind’s Fr\u00fchlings Erwachen. The musical is snappily staged, but it smooths out a brilliantly disconcerting play which is all jagged edges. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}