The use of technology, contrary to my doubts, actually formed a very successful medium for highlighting adolescent isolation and anxieties in a society pervaded by the internet. The graphic pornography was pixelated as if enlarged beyond its resolution; the moving shapes blurred to the extent that the experience became mainly one of sound. This sound was worrying, ambiguous, animalistic, and I wasn't sure what to make of it until Wendla asked Melchior to tie up her hands with his school tie and hit her. Ilse's video call to Moritz just prior to his suicide revealed the frantic, smudged eyes of the very vulnerable girl on a large screen, the smile a little too large, doubled through her literal presence on stage. At one point, Ilse and Moritz were sitting next to each other on the bed, her facing her phone, him facing his laptop. Technology formed a means of communication, but also a means of miscommunication, as Melchior and Moritz waded through a range of socially transgressive porn and Melchior apologised to Wendla via email.
The characters often emerged from behind the strips of plastic forming the screen - it became a permeable surface that united them all, despite creating partitions. The backdrop to Moritz's suicide was a particularly effective: a photo of a garden patterned with computer icons, in which a digitalised Moritz went prepared to hang himself with a belt while the real Moritz watched. The modern world creates a community of people whose everyday actions can be tracked, and hardly anyone exists without a digital trace. But each one of the characters in Spring Awakening displayed signs of loneliness and exposure to what was going on around them. Their self-conceived roles were never quite stable.
This was heightened by metatheatrical scenes in which the characters became their parents and teachers, caught trying to act out their perceptions of adulthood. Sometimes, these impressions seemed deliberately shaky, revealing the adolescent underneath the sensible cardigans and glasses. However, the actors seemed to occupy these new roles when the action required it. Wendla's attempt to talk about sex with her mother was almost physically painful, but became more so at the crisis point of the play: Wendla's rape by Melchior. This was staged on top of a bunk bed, while Martha (playing Melchior's mother) left a voicemail for Moritz. The split-screen effect was simultaneously hypnotic and utterly horrifying.
The graphic nature of Spring Awakening is still incredibly shocking for a twenty-first century audience, dealing with fairly explicit rape, violence, masturbation and pornography. However, there were occasional glimmers of hope beneath the surface, like the moment when Ernst turned to Hans after kissing him and said: 'In thirty years time we might look back and think this is stupid, but, for now, it's beautiful, isn't it?' However, the re-stacking of chairs didn't solve the almost apocalyptic turmoil generated in the course of the play, and this was something which, once begun, never really left. Melchior's brooding on morality and subjectivity was the only thing that I felt lasted slightly too long, but it succeeded in creating a stifling sensation, a crisis with little room for manoeuvre. This stifling vision was frozen in the final scene of the play, when all of the characters put on their cardigans and glasses and tweed jackets and stood at the front of the stage, both as the adults they previously depicted, and the vulnerable teenagers beneath. The idea of the emergence of a new cycle of parents avoiding honest communication with their children was one of the scariest thoughts suggested by the play, particularly since two of the central characters did not form part of this line-up.
Anya Reiss' rendition of Frank Wedekind's play was provocative and emotional. The moment, about halfway through, when all the lights went on and the stage was presented in harsh white lighting, was similar to the way that I felt at the end, attempting to renegotiate myself among these characters representing youth and coming of age, but a coming of age caught up in both real and virtual acts of violence, asymmetric power, and dishonesty.
