Spring Awakening at the Novello Theatre

Spring Awakening at the Novello Theatre

02 April, 2009
by: Jimmy

Spring Awakening at the Novello Theatre is an exceptionally vulgar, occasionally blazingly funny musical based on subjects about as unsuited for the medium as you can imagine. These include teenage pregnancy, teenage suicide, teenage sadomasochistic fetishism and teenage death by backstreet abortionist, besides incest, prostitution, care-home violence, predatory homosexuality, bukkake, many lashings of onanistic self-abuse – and a hit song entitled 'Totally F***ed'.

This is unusual for a West End musical.

The explanation lies in Steven Sater's cunning adaptation of a 19th century German play of the same name. This original sounds like the worst kind of queasy Victorian melodrama, no matter its playwright's moan that audiences weren't 'able to see the humour'. Nevertheless by taking the 19th century setting, lurid plot and cardboard stereotype characters, 'Spring Awakening' manages to brush against topics and taboos that never usually travel further than the fringe.

This may be a good thing for the West End in general, but to have it all in one place simultaneously makes this musical a fairly hefty assault on the senses. It's like watching MTV for a couple hours: the songs tend to merge, and they seem to be in constant competition, out to be the 'edgiest'.

Nominally the story is of teenage growing pains (the failure of adults to understand the next generation, the failure of teenagers to express their emotions and so on) but mainly it's about sex, or at least sexual frustration – American Pie via Rilke. The boys and girls talk to each other about boys and girls then try to talk to each other about sex, invariably fail and so sing about it instead (the songs usually being their private thoughts and fantasies). Occasionally, they sing about other things too, like suicide and making your parents feel guilty, and how hard it is to get into the sixth form; but for the most part, they stick to copulation.

Inevitably, in spite of the dictatorial segregation of girls and boys, one couple do enjoy a coming together only for it all to go terribly wrong as their inhumane parents and teachers have failed to explain to them consequences. Though since by this point one of them has written a treatise on coitus, I'm not sure the blame can be entirely levelled at the parents.

'Spring Awakening' has won some pretty strong support and it's not hard to see why. The story is risqué, Richard Cordery and Sian Thomas playing all the adult parts are excellent, the young cast are energetic (Jos Slovick in one of the supporting roles probably the pick) and though the cheese-rock songs are forgettable, they're mercifully short.

There's not as much dancing as there might be. That's easily forgivable, less easy is the script, which is best when it's camp, painful when the lead couple are mooning about and rotten whenever it ventures out of a bourgeoisie comfort zone. The moment when one of the girls is tricked into a visit to the abortionist's isn't simply uncomfortable but repulsive, since it's used as a quick shuffle plot device. As bad is the hero's descent into a borstal-like reform school whose working class inhabitants are depicted as perverts and thugs. These parts may have come straight from the original but they should have been corrected, or at least approached ironically.

In the end there's only one trick this musical really pulls off – somehow making onstage masturbation, suicide and sex into a feelgood, appealing musical. It's quite some trick. As energetic and daring in its way as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this musical is not for everyone, but it is certainly the randiest show in the West End right now.

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Jimmy