Photos: c_ Rita Newman
VIENNA / Theater der Jugend.
SPRING AWAKENING
after Frank Wedekind by Thomas Birkmeir
Premiere: March 24, 2023,
the performance was attended on March 27, 2023
One has had so many bad to devastating experiences with so-called “overwriting” that one is skeptical about this method of interpretation, which is unfortunately so widely cultivated nowadays. But it can also work like this Thomas Birkmeirthe director of the Theater der Jugend, with his version of Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening”.
It’s not (only) about frantic modernization, the editor clearly takes Wedekind’s play as a starting point and develops the problems of a youth, which in the original is located around the turn of the last century, logically for today – with the “current” additions, but but with basically the same problem: how difficult it is for young people during puberty, and that not everyone is able to deal with it…
Thomas Birkmeir reduces parts of the plot (the school teachers, Moritz Stiefel’s parents) and concentrates on the essentials in the fast-paced process, namely the lives of the three young people who have become world-famous in theater history: Wendla Bergman, Melchior Gabor and vor especially Moritz Stiefel, one of the tragic “suicides” in literature. The tragedy” Wendlas, who dies as a result of a pregnancy (it is not clear here that the mother had arranged for an abortion), Melchior, the clever one, who philosophizes at a cool distance from people and feelings (that he parents is sent to a kind of “reformatory” does not take place here) and in the end, faced with the choice between life and death, chooses life. And Moritz Stiefel, to whom everything that one wants to force on him as a future seems so terribly pointless that he shoots himself.
He does this in this performance in front of the camera, and Thomas Birkmeir has shoveled all the ingredients of today’s life into the play almost en masse – the smartphones and the ubiquitous social media, tattoos and cheerleaders, the Islam problem (he leaves one of Wendla’s friends being a Muslim who complains heavily about how she is being treated) and, most importantly, the transgender issue. If a model named Ilse appears at Wedekind, Birkmeir turns it into a classmate who tests his trans existence in an almost experimental way. Furthermore, it is also grafted on to refugees (with a briefly touched, questioned “do-gooder” attitude), and one is directly surprised that the new author Birkmeir left out the climate stickers, where the young people, half ironically juggling phrases, apparently discuss everything that is “in” today…
The piece, which Wedekind and also in this version runs largely “realistically”, is famous for its irrational ending: Moritz Stiefel appears from his grave and wants to take his friend Melchior to his death – but then suddenly there is the one who is not further defined “Vermummte Herr” (which Wedekind played himself at the premiere of the play), which brings him back to life…
Thomas Birkmeir works as his own director with a slanted stage (stage design: Andreas Lungschmid), where the young performers in today’s clothes (costumes: Irmgard Kersting) move. And they are really young, not the 15-year-old teenagers (Wedekind didn’t know the word yet), who are supposed to move on stage in the original, but credibly young people, whereby the pain of the world and of life that pervades Moritz Ludwig Wendelin Weissenberger is conveyed wonderfully. Curtin Caviezel is perhaps cooler as Melchior than in the original, but believable and intense in all actions. The young Wendla is beautiful Victoria Hauerwho is seen at the beginning in a violent argument with her mother, but who then turns out to be a good being driven to despair.
An adult (Simone Kast particularly good as Wendla’s mother between love and genuine maternal despair) and five young actors (Shirina Granmayeh, Claudia Waldherr. Robin Jentys, Jakob Pinter – impressive in its transformation into “Ilse” – and Haris Ademovic) realize all roles in a fast-paced, unsparing production that gets under your skin and is always touching.
The well-attended repertoire performance also saw many adults in the audience. It is not the first time that the Theater der Jugend is offering an evening that no theater lover, regardless of age, should miss out on.
Renate Wagner