Spring Awakening
Almeida Theatre
 

SATER and Sheik’s multi-award winning musical version of Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play dealing with pubescent sexuality and angst in an uncompromising and authoritarian adult world is revived on stage in this striking new production.

Set around two single sex schools and 13 students, Wedekind’s tragic original script is stripped down and updated with 20 memorable songs but still clearly evident.

The score extends the play’s indictment of adults’ condescending and oppressive treatment of the young to an age of Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai where the needs of children to make themselves heard and understood seems ever more pressing.

Director Rupert Goold has produced a slick, energetic and moving drama, maximising the impact of Miriam Buether’s tiered staging to co-ordinate his largely youthful cast in a brilliant ensemble piece, while Lynne Page’s choreography enhances the group’s shared sense of growing self-awareness and hormonal energy.

Laurie Kynaston is a captivating presence on stage and is outstanding in the key role of Melchior, a bright, inquisitive boy facing a world where his curiosity and natural, emotional instincts are judged as a perversion by the hypocritical and condescending figures in charge. His secret, love, Wendla, soulfully played by Amara Okereke, is winningly guileless without seeming naive, while Stuart Thompson plays his doomed friend with a tragic inevitability.

Catherine Cusack and Mark Lockyear enthusiastically multi-role as the domineering adults, flipping between masks, wigs and accents to create a range of self-interested, darkly humorous authority figures abusing their power, chiding, cajoling and damaging their charges without any attempt to understand their needs.

The folk-infused rock score and live accompaniment provides the cast’s harmonies and outpourings with a vibrancy and immediacy that has a striking impact in the intimacy of the Almeida and Jack Knowles’s lighting design creates a harsh-edged world surrounded by shadows and fantasies.

Rarely do I feel the need to list the contributions of so many individuals in a production, but this performance is a glorious, collaborative piece where the actors, directors and designers all seem to have worked to the same unified concept and achieved what must be the standout new show in London at the moment.
 

Runs until Jan 22, box-office: almeida.co.uk