Capturing the intensity of adolescence

MIND MOVES:Rock musical gives a voice to teenagers

I SAW a daring rock musical – Spring Awakening– at the Helix last week that captured the intensity of adolescence as well as anything I remember. Based on a play written more than a century ago, it charts the agony and the ecstasy of emergent sexuality and self-discovery.

It was produced by the National Youth Musical Theatre (NYMT) with an incredibly talented cast of mainly Leaving Cert and first year university students, who gave it everything they had.

I had no idea what it was about when I took a troop of young people with me as a thank you to them for completing a project we had worked on together all summer. And the impact of the performance was all the more compelling for that.

This play had been burned and banned for a century when it was originally written because of its portrayal of masturbation, rape, homosexuality, bondage, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, abortion and suicide.

It didn't take long into this performance to realise we were a long way from Grease, Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatand traditional school musicals I had enjoyed over the years.

While it all might sound highly risque, the power of Spring Awakeninglay in the honesty with which it addressed all these issues, and the insights it offered into how the struggle to come to terms with them are played out in the mind of an adolescent. It named what was real and didn't flinch at expressing some truths that were virtually unspeakable a generation ago.

To the young people I had brought with me, it spoke powerfully to their experience of growing up. This was theatre at its best, pulling us out by the ears, opening our eyes, touching us where it hurt, and offering catharsis and change.

Adolescence is an incredibly intense business. It is full of possibility and self-discovery, but it is also a time of exquisite vulnerability. It is a time of life where immaturity is the mark of health and not of something wrong.

Adolescents are not meant to be reasonable, balanced, logical and wise; they don’t do grey, they see the world as black or white; they don’t do compromise; they reach for idealism and they will put their lives on the line for something that captures their longing to feel real.

Spring Awakeningexplored a number of ways in which the behaviour of adults in the lives of the teenage cast "destroyed" their emerging lives, particularly the way pathology can develop when we – the adults in their lives – manipulate young people, because they represent in some way a threat.

Loving our children and encouraging them to “find themselves” may feel strange, even wrong to us, as this freedom and respect was never part of our growing up. Getting close to adolescents may stir up old wounds and expose the compromises we have made in our emotionally starved lives.

Parenting adolescents poses a fundamentally different challenge to raising younger children. In the first 10-12 years of your children’s life, you could stand still and watch them blossom before your eyes.

With teenagers, this won’t work. They need you as much as they ever have, but in order to be effective, you’ve got to be willing to grow up yourself and to notice when you revert to unhelpful parenting patterns. You need to be willing to look at the craziness of those reactions, at the pain you felt when you were treated that way – and change.

Spring Awakeningwas ultimately a great example of the vital role that adults play in the lives of adolescents, for better or for worse. While it seemed that it was all about these "kids" letting loose about how screwed up this world can be, the opportunity to safely explore these issues with courage and skill, and perform them with tremendous impact, was made possible by adults.

These adults gave shape and form to their inner experience, but never lost sight that it belonged to them and never tried to steal it from them. Full marks to NYMT.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)