Spring Awakening, Almeida Theatre review ★★★★★

Steven Sater’s coming-of-age musical Spring Awakening, with its stunning score by Duncan Sheik, was a rip-roaring success on Broadway. Based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same name, the teenage angst-rooted show opened in 2006 to instant critical acclaim and eight Tony awards. Reviving it in London this Christmas is the Almeida Theatre, with artistic director Rupert Goold employing a talented young cast, some barely out of drama school, to kindle the inner turmoil of its high-school-aged characters.

While there’s plenty to admire about the production – Lynne Page’s neat choreography and a chance to hear powerful, live renditions of Sater and Sheik’s rich folk-rock songs in particular – Goold misses a trick in not making this story, with its timeless and universal theme of teenage angst, feel more current.

Spring Awakening at the Almeida. Photo: Marc Brenner

Set in late 19th-century Germany, with characters confusingly keeping their dated German names despite their British accents and modern dress, we meet the 13-strong gaggle of forlorn teenages on a set of sweeping black bleachers, designed by Miriam Buether (Hymn, Albion). In this world of teenagers versus adult oppressors (a trope familiar in contemporary culture, though remarkably subversive for Wedekind’s day), teachers reign large as stifling villains – a sentiment playfully exaggerated here by Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes, which distort the schoolmasters' faces with nightmarish prosthetics.

For the focal pupils, it’s a time when school grades are a matter of life and death; when losing your virginity is your own personal Mount Everest; when sex is a fantasy involving your teacher; and when lying side-by-side, hands touching, on frigid nights is enough to be mistaken for true love. All this is encapsulated in Sater’s tender lyrics, in particular the frustration-charged The Bitch of Living and sexual awakening number The Word of Your Body. The latter is delivered with a masterly balance of timidity and longing by Amara Okereke as Wendla and Laurie Kynaston as Melchior, in two of the show’s standout performances.

Spring Awakening. Stuart Thompson (Moritz), Amara Okereke (Wendla) and Laurie Kynaston (Melchior). Photo: Marc Brenner

Sheik’s score, performed by a live band playing from glass-fronted boxes on either side of the stage, flits between soft lilts and angry outbursts, mirroring the yoyo-ing hormones of its young characters. Channeling this internal tug-of-war elsewhere is Page’s choreography, which in classroom number All That’s Known sees the pupils jerk their upper bodies with robotic rigidity, battling against their confinement. Later, as Amara and Laurie acknowledge their feelings for one another, they slide backwards, head first, down the bleachers, resigning themselves physically to the emotional bruising of which they sing.

The rebellion is further conjured by Buether’s set, where pothole-like school seats double up as fire-pits, and the clever visual effects of video designer Finn Ross and lighting lead Jack Knowles illuminate the bleachers with graffiti, and later, tragically, gravestones.

Spring Awakening at the Almeida. Photo: Marc Brenner

While the potholes in the set are used to dramatic effect, there are gaping chasms in the plot that let down Goold’s production. The botched abortion scene, in particular, is skimmed over so ambiguously it makes it impossible to feel any emotion other than bafflement during the subsequent graveyard scene.

The decision to leave the narrative in an archaic world of draconian teachers brandishing canes – save for some Gen-Z space bun hairstyles and Billie Eilish-esque gothic get-up – renders Spring Awakening a period piece, when it has all the potential to speak of the teenage experience today.

Still, Spring Awakening managed to officially open in one of the toughest and most tense weeks yet for London’s theatre scene, when each day was shadowed by the announcement of further cancellations due to cast and crew members having to isolate with Covid-19. This, and the chance to watch its accomplished cast perform Sater’s songs with raw passion, makes it a run worth rooting for.