It’s every schoolboy’s fantasy. An older woman – but not too old, a MILF or a cougar in modern parlance - makes erotic overtures to her teenage son’s best friend. Both parties are at their flesh and blood sexual peak, one a guilessly naïve book-worm yet to understand just how dangerous a little knowledge can be, the other an all too knowing amalgam of The Graduate’s Mrs Robinson and Miss Jean Brodie.
The scenario being played out in an old Leith warehouse even seems to be taking place in a mock-up of a classroom, where, beyond the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, the facts of life are taught wholesale. There’s a blackboard, chalk and weightily academic books scattered like seeds on the floor.
Or at least that’s how it seems in the rehearsal room for site-specific wunderkinds Grid Iron’s forthcoming production of Spring Awakening, Frank Wedekind’s seminal dramatic exploration of sex and adolescence that scandalised audiences when it eventually premiered in 1906 fifteen years after it was written.
In Grid Iron’s hands, Spring Awakening has been re-acclimatised to the Calvinist backwaters of nineteenth century Scotland in a new version b y Douglas Maxwell, something of a specialist in coming of age dramas that have included the recent Grid Iron revival of Decky Does A Bronco. Ben Harrison’s production of Spring Awakening also marks a rare sighting of Grid Iron in an actual theatre rather than assorted airports, department stores and underground labyrinths that the company have made their own.
As actress Gail Watson works her wiles on fellow performer Fin Den Hertog while Gavin Wright looks on, however, for a play in which boys and girls come out to play in the locked room of desire where sex is a matter of life and death, all of this seems strangely appropriate. Teenage pregnancy, suicide, promiscuity, homosexual awakening, rape, abuse and other pre-cursors to the kitchen-sink and in-yer-face generations are present and correct in a project that may concentrate on a panoply of regular Grid Iron obsessions, but which, in their world at least, feels like it’s been a long time coming.
“We first wanted to do this six years ago,” Harrison explains on a break in rehearsals of what is now a co-production with Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, “but because of various financial restraints we couldn’t. But I think it’s worked out for the best, because the timing is right because we so recently did Decky, which looks at childhood, and with Spring Awakening we’re immediately looking at adolescence. It seemed like a logical and pleasing thing to do.
"I suppose I would see this production in the context of lots of other work about teenagers, of which there is a hell of a lot now, especially in Edinburgh, where you’ve had Otroerend Goed doing Once and For All,” Harrison says of the Belgian company whose real life teenagers laid bare there lives with a rare and unfettered frankness in a show that took the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm, and who followed it up this year with the self-explanatory Teenage Riot.
“Not that we’re going to be as anarchic as that, because it wouldn’t make sense to the period the play’s set in, but there are a couple of moments of what’s I suppose a kind of punk aesthetic. People have attempted to do the play outside of its time period, but I think that makes no sense at all. The lack of knowledge that the characters have is entirely to do with the fact that they have no television or ways of sharing this information, the church is very strong and it was originally set in a land-locked culture in eastern Europe.
"There’s also this idea that the teenager was invented in 1950, because it wasn’t something that was acknowledged. You were a child, then there was this huge jump to becoming an adult, and there was an awkward gap inbetween the two which none of the adults can deal with, and none of the children can either, because they simply don’t have the knowledge at their fingertips.”
While Harrison isn’t referring to the hit Broadway rock musical adaptation of the play, which, however bizarre the concept, kept its setting intact, his comments do beg the question of why anyone should even bother reviving such an apparently immoveable work?
“There is a question you have to ask when you’re doing a repertoire play,” Harrison admits, “about what the relevance of it is now. If you’re doing a new play by an exciting writer, there is an argument for just doing it for those reasons alone. Even though Spring Awakening is a repertoire piece, it is a new adaptation by Douglas Maxwell, who is a very exciting writer, and in that way it stretches the boundaries both of what Grid Iron are about and what the Traverse is about as a new writing theatre. It works pleasingly well in a Scots Calvinist voice. Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow girls are there in this very dour society, but there are new influences coming in from elsewhere that the characters in the play pick up on. Despite all this, I still think we live in a post-Calvinist society.”
To illustrate this, Harrison points to an incident that occurred in an Edinburgh primary school as couple of years ago, in which a group of nine year olds were exploring marriage rituals in the playground. While such seemingly harmless fun never moved beyond boys and girls pairing up for mock ceremonies that never even moved on to old-fashioned games of kiss-chase, the exercise was nevertheless banned by the school authorities. If this wasn’t over-reaction enough, the reason they gave for the ban speaks volumes about the sheer hypocritical terror some members of the establishment have in terms of allowing children to express what are still seen in some quarters as taboo subjects.
“They said it had to do with the risk of swine flu,” Harrison says, somewhat aghast. “That’s insane. Wedekind could’ve written that. This was harmless rough and tumble, but it showed there are still pockets of society that cling to these old ideas. The basic thing the play is saying is that if you don’t tell children what they need to know, it will all end in death and suicide. That may be extreme, and the play is very satirical and is quite adolescent itself and a bit all over the place, but that really appealed.”
As did too a more conventional performance space than most of Grid Iron’s previous work. Spring Awakening will be the company’s first production to grace an orthodox stage since another youth-based work, streetwise graffiti-based rap opera, Fierce, which played Edinburgh’s assembly Rooms during the Fringe. Before that there was the collaboration with Edinburgh International Festival at the King’s Theatre with the Maxwell-scripted Variety. Going even further back, Grid Iron’s first ever show was a play called Fierce that announced the company’s arrival in 1996.
“It was almost the most radical thing we could do,” says Harrison. “After fifteen years off exploring all these different spaces, the Traverse feels like a very comfortable space to go into. The play is set in a very controlled environment of a classroom, and doing it in a regular theatre reflects that.”
In terms of its hormone-popping energy and anti-establishment themes, and especially given it’s setting, Grid Iron’s Spring Awakening sits alongside everything from Nigel Williams’ 1978 play, Class Enemy to Simon Stephens’ more recent Punk Rock.
“I think looking back at adolescence is very profound,” says Harrison. “That’s the period that shaped you one way or the other, and that’s the period of your life you’ll never ever forget.”
Spring Awakening, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews October 29-31, then November 2nd-13th.
www.gridiron.co.uk
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, October 26th 2010
ends
Comments