Product Description

Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced Wedekind's notorious play Spring Awakening was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first complete performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from this translation by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pable, 'scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry.' The Times This translation of Spring Awakening was first performed at the National Theatre, London on 24 May 1974. For this edition the translator, Edward Bond, has written a note on the play and a factual introduction to Wedekind's life and work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61293 in Books
• Published on: 1980-11-13
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 59 pages

About the Author
Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) was a journalist, advertising manager, secretary to a circus, cabaret artiste, satirist, convict and actor as well as the author of twenty-one plays, many of which reflect aspects of his extraordinary career. He himself paid for the publication of Spring Awakening (1891), though it was not staged till 1906. (In England it was banned from public performance until 1963.) Earth Spirit (1895), the first of his plays to be seen on stage (1898), introduced the sexually voracious Lulu, who also figured in Pandora's Box (1904) and subsequently in Alban Berg's opera (Lulu, 1935) and in Peter Barnes' conflation of the two plays seen in England in 1970. Other notable plays include The Marquis of Keith (1900; British premiere, 1974), King Nicolo (1902), Castle Wetterstein (1910) and Franziska (1912). Wedekind was greatly admired by Brecht, and his satiric songs still have considerable bite.

Customer Reviews

If you only ever direct one play....
Edward Bond's translation is without a doubt the strongest of Wedekind's work. This play will get into your head and never leave. I have recently had the pleasure of directing this wonderful text. Yes it is heavy, covering rape, aborton, suicide and homosexuality, bent doctors and a mothers very strange view of how to bring up a child. But don't be deterred. You can't help but feel for the characters, having their youth stunted by an overprotective society. The adults of the play think they know best, yet they cause all the trouble. Spring Awakening is so relevent for today. It is shocking, but only through familiarity of the situations.

Nothing can change under the sun
This plays reveals a common theme at the time, the enslavement of young people in Germany within their boarding schools. Törless is the most famous victim of this environment. But here we are dealing with Moritz and Melchior, proving that M&M's is not the best of medicine in life. This total control of the young people's life that has only one objective, to study, to learn Latin and translate Greek, goes along with an absolute desexualization of their psyche in the name of an extreme puritan vision of ethics and life. This causes a depressive existential vision in these teenagers who look for some satisfaction anyway they can, some erotic information and literature, some friendship among themselves as a surrogate of the love they need and are deprived of, even banging up the first girl they find on their road and who knows nothing about love or rather intercourse. This produces a drama, of course. One fourteen year old boy, Moritz, commits suicide in his boarding school that expels his best friend, Melchior, who had passed some information about the physical activities they are all dreaming of, and had impregnated a certain Wendla who will die of an overdose of an abortive drug given to her by her own mother. This sexual information is considered as the unethical trigger of the suicide. Melchior's family then decides to send him to a house of correction where he discovers real evil and convinces himself he is the most guilty human being in the world. He is then tempted by crime or, because of some remnant of ethics, by suicide to put away his good for nothing person. This dilemma is set up on the stage after Melchior's escape from the house of correction in the last scenes in the graveyard where the suicidee Moritz is buried. Melchior is thus, then and there tempted to join his departed friend Moritz who is reaching out for him. But life is stronger and it comes embodied in an unidentified man who steps in and explains to Melchior that life is a long road that can provide all kinds of surprises that death cannot. This play is the matrix of many other plays and films, the most famous film being the Dead Poets' Society. But this play recently found in France its perfect illustration and re-enactment in French teenagers' prisons with several suicides resulting from total negligence if not unethical mistakes from the personnel who considered - and probably still considers - speaking of suicide was some kind of blackmail from the kids, even if they were depressive which was another way of blackmailing the personnel, wasn't it, and some kind of humorous joke to be used as a torturing device by the personnel to satisfy their sadistic and revengeful perversion onto the kids they are supposed to educate to some fair social life. Nothing has changed under the sun, or under the moon as for that. Not even the fate of young people when their society forgets they are human, forgets it takes a whole village to educate one young child, forgets they have to love people if they want to really educate and reform them. But love is the only thing thatis not available in the pedagogical and "professional" minds of these people who are called prison wardens and other personnel.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.