Spring Awakening

Everyman Palace, Cork

A co-production uniting the Granary Theatre, the Bare Cheek Company and the Everyman Palace,

Spring Awakening

is not the kind of musical from which one emerges singing a happy tune. It is best described as rage put to music, or characterised in a trio of exes: explicit, explosive and extreme.

Although written by Frank Wedekind in 1891, its superficial theme of adolescent yearning and discovery might seem outdated by now, despite the frantic sympathy with which the issues are presented, but at its core this is a play as subversive and socially excoriating as anything by, for example, Ibsen or, half a century later, John Osborne. Writing before his time (he might have been useful a few decades later), Wedekind wrapped sex, social lies and early death into a theatrical documentation of hypocrisy; if his characters are mostly rebellious youth they had, in fact, a lot to rebel against. Director Tony Mcleane-Fay gets his cast smartly into order, marshalling some very good voices matched by instrumentalists led by Shane French. Inevitably these are young players, portraying the anxieties of a group of teenage boys and girls and the attitudes of their elders who encourage sexual ignorance as a bastion against what one character calls “the creeping sensuality of these liberal times” while condoning incest, cruelty and abortion.

All a bit much for a musical, but the score and lyrics by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, sustaining the adaptation by Tom Hulce, give the narrative, exclamatory songs their relevance. Erupting into the action rather than flowing from the context, these are confidently offered by Aoife Moore, Michael O’Toole and Matthew Williams and supported by the choreography by Philip McTeggart-Walsh.

The many adults are supplied by Laura Daly and Ashley Strand, and Aoife Cahill’s lighting design indicates the electric impact of the original play.

Runs until October 27th