Week two, book two

A play - Spring Awakening

I've had an incredibly busy (it's sort of ridiculous) first fortnight or so back at work, so I decided to take it easy for the second week's text and pick a play, and again one whose plot I know quite well.

And then I forgot to publish this post for a further week.

As will become apparent, I'm something of a theatre fan, and I absolutely love the 2006 musical adaptation of the play. For those who don't know it, the musical of Spring Awakening is in many ways historically accurate. Its costumes and dialogue are largely as they would have been in early twentieth century productions of the original play, and dialogue in particular has been kept deliberately close to Wedekind's text.

And then there's the part where the score is made up of modern rock songs.

It sounds utterly bizarre, but this actually works really well, and is definitely in keeping with Wedekind's play. The 1906 Spring Awakening is forward-thinking, it's perceptive, and its message was so important and so refreshing at the time. It's a play about teenagers and at least partly for them. (It's also targeted pretty clearly at the adults raising, teaching, and preaching to said teenagers.) A rock score makes sense. Like the play, it's refreshing, and its melodies, lyrics, and choreography are so vibrant and youthful. It's two-thirds energetic joyful youth and a third heartbreak looking at the lives of these children from over 100 years ago.

I really enjoyed the play, especially the handful of scenes that were totally new to me. I'm trying to be spoiler-free, but at one point a character's father tells us repeatedly that "the boy was nothing to me" while clearly grieving for his lost son. Obviously, seeing a parent say anything along these lines is always distressing, but the man is utterly destroyed and swearing otherwise to keep it together. (Of course, this same emotional divide between a detached father and an anxious son is what did much of the damage in the first place.) The nature of this scene in the musical means that the father is mute - pretty neat, especially given the tyrannical control he displays over his son until this point - while the other children grieve aloud. To read Wedekind's play and see the father totally break down - but still not admitting it! - really got to me.

I'm not convinced by my translation of Spring Awakening and might look out for other versions of it throughout the year, but I'm glad I read it. Fair warning: the story is pretty heavy and contains discussion and depiction of child abuse, underage sex, suicide, and abortion.

I read the Ziegler translation, available for free here. Here's the reading guide I'm following this year.