Banned until the ’60s, this musical must be seen
IT’S hard to believe but until 1968, German playwright Frank Wedekind’s 1891 cutting-edge play about adolescent angst, sexual awakening and adult oppression was banned by UK censors.
‘One of the most loathsome, depraved and diseased plays I’ve ever read,’ said the offended reader.
Such moralists would be surprised to discover that in Rupert Goold’s stunning
revival of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s 2006 multi-award-winning rock opera, it is the adults who look loathsome and depraved.
The embarrassment of a mother insisting that a stork is responsible for babies is as unforgivably ugly as a father beating his daughter for her disturbing beauty.
Goold turns the teachers into grotesques, occasionally masked, always
ghoulish and gruesome. The fresh-faced young, open and impressionable
demonstrate a deep sensitivity to their own feelings and to bigger world issues. Cue the chorus of ‘Blah, blah, blah’, echoing Greta Thunberg’s opinion of world leaders’ response to climate
change. And in a key change to the original, Sater has made Melchior’s daterape of the innocent Wendla in the hayloft into a tender love affair, exquisitely caught in Sheik’s song I Believe.
In a conventional musical, the music pushes the story forward. Here, it creates an intense emotional subtext in which the young express the inexpressible in furious, pulsing anthems such as ‘Totally F **** d’ or moving, angst-filled ballads, best of all, ‘O, I’m gonna be wounded/I’m gonna be your wound’. If lyrics linger longer than the melodies, in the moment, the music soars.
Miriam Buether’s inspired dark and doomy design of a steep rake of blackboard steps, tripling as school, forest and graveyard, also evokes the exhilarating ups and depressing downs of adolescence and the vulnerability and precariousness of youth.
Several scenes close with a character topsy-turvy, capturing how it feels to be young in a world turned upside down by a pandemic.
An astonishing cast of actors on the rise and those making their professional stage debut are all stars, injecting real urgency into the piece, making it a mustsee before it ends its run on January 29.