Spring Awakening – A New Musical
Almeida Theatre London 2022
Photo by Marc Brenner
055 – Spring Awakening, by Frank Wedekind
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German playwright Frank Wedekind’s dark, expressionist play Spring Awakening – A Children’s Tragedy was written in 1891. It is an extraordinarily frank depiction of teenage anxiety and sexuality, which includes graphic scenes of masturbation, sado-masochism, homosexuality and rape, as well as suicide and abortion. The play was so controversial in its time that it was 15 years before it was first performed in 1906 in Berlin, and only then with cuts demanded by the censor. It is a nightmarish, cautionary portrait of adolescent angst and rebellion against oppressive social strictures and family expectations.
The play is also the unlikely source for the modern rock musical of the same name, which premiered on Broadway in 2006, and was recently revived at the Almeida Theatre in London in a storming new production directed by their Artistic Director, Rupert Goold. The musical retains much of the dark narrative of the original, adding a score that enunciates all of the young people’s yearnings, fears and frustrations, as well as their hopeful energy and defiance, though it arguably also softens some of the shock of Wedekind’s original play.
To talk us through the contemporary controversies and enduring power of Spring Awakening, I’m delighted to welcome the Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford, Karen Leeder.
Professor Karen Leeder
Karen Leeder studied German at Oxford and the University of Hamburg. After teaching for three years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, she took up her Fellowship at New College in 1993 and became Professor of Modern German Literature in 2008, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2017 and Fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2020.
She is a prize-winning translator of contemporary literature and has published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods.
In 2016 she received an English PEN and an American PEN award for her translations of Ulrike Almut Sandig Thick of it. She is a Trustee of the Stephen Spender Trust and the Poetry Translation Centre and regularly appears on radio and television talking about aspects of German culture.
Karen recommended Woyzeck by Georg Buchner.
Photo by Stefan Rumpf
The Footnotes to our episode on Spring Awakening include observations on how Wedekind’s own life reflected events and values contained in the play; notes on how the first production was finally able to take place fifteen years after the play was written; and some of the parallels with Goethe’s Faust.
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112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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