Review: Pains of Youth - The Jewish Chronicle

There is much in Ferdinand Bruckner’s play that is fascinating. And there is very little in Katie Mitchell’s production that is less than brilliant. So why a reserved three stars instead of an emphatic five?

There are some physical responses to a show, that whatever its merits, cannot be denied. For instance, no matter how offensive or unfashionable a comedy may be, if you laugh, it is funny.

And no matter how convincing and intellectually rigorous a piece of serious drama, if you yawn…well, it is not necessarily a bore, but you know a battle has been lost when a drama allows the mind to drift into tiredness.

And by the end of two and half hours of passionate, self-obsessed angst — albeit suffered by tragic youths — Mitchell’s production had lost its tension. By then the sense of foreboding, of something awful approaching (which makes perfect sense in a play written and set between two World Wars), had dwindled into something much less interesting. A wait.

Being this country’s most radical director/artist is not without its risks. For Mitchell’s latest attempt to push the boundaries — a thing which all theatre practitioners claim is their objective but few have the talent to realise — she has taken this Austrian-Jewish dramatist’s 1923 play, which is here presented in a new English version by Martin Crimp, and teased from its single narrative strand about navel-gazing Viennese medical students a couple of extra dimensions.

One of these is entirely of Mitchell’s own creation, and is found between the scenes. The other is the play itself, which is set entirely in the high-ceilinged bedroom of a Viennese university boarding house. Only educational institutions manage to be this elegant and impersonal, and Vicki Mortimer’s design gets exactly right the sense of a varnished establishment that is permanently lived in by temporary occupants.

It is here that the students’ fickle emotions run riot and where love goes unrequited. Not a triangle this, more a seven-sided love heptagon, the centre of which is held by the bi-sexual Desiree (Lydia Wilson). It is she who scoops up the rejected Marie (Laura Elphinstone) who has been spurned by the nerdy Petrell (Leo Bill), who beds the heartless Freder, who puts the naïve maid Lucy (Sian Clifford) on the game.

And it is aristocratic Desiree who identifies and declares the bleak choice that haunts these educated depressives, and probably anyone who wants life to be other than crushingly conventional. “Bourgeois existence,” she says, “or suicide. There are no other options.”

This reference to self-destruction is the verbal equivalent of a gun revealed in the first act. We wait for it to go off in the third.

And it makes sense of the dimension Mitchell has brought to the play. This is found in what most people would call scene changes, but which the production’s creative team apparently referred to as “interventions”.

During these in-between moments, Simon Allen’s haunting, 12-tone music (in the unremittingly unmelodic style of the day pioneered by Schoenberg), emits the kind of sound that would do well for Chekhov’s mysterious noise in The Seagull.

The music heralds time grinding to a halt. Characters freeze on the spot, and on walk modern-day, black-suited secret-service types who move and remove props. At the end of an act they cover the furniture with sheets of polythene as if protecting a crime scene.

Make your own interpretation of this. But tellingly, each scene begins with one of the agents placing a narcotic in one of the students’ hands — a drink, some pills, a pipette to administer medicine, a cigarette — resulting in a change in its user’s condition or, in one case, the end of it altogether.

And to add to this tension, there is a particular deadpan quality to the acting. Lines are hurriedly spoken and punctuated by worried glances over the shoulder as if the protagonists are expecting a violent interruption.

Pains of Youth — which is more often translated as “Sickness of Youth” — was written a decade before the lesser crafted but significant The Races which Bruckner produced as a response to the Nazis coming to power, and in particular to Jewish persecution.

It is tempting to see Mitchell’s production, which slips in and out of the period in which Bruckner’s play is set, as a sort of warning of what is to come, but one that is also viewed in retrospect. Perhaps that is why the programme features a picture of Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer who could not bear the thought of his beloved Europe being dominated by Hitler, and so killed himself. But whatever the intention of Mitchell’s added dimension, we are left with a mysterious yet convincing vision of a society suspended between catastrophes and infected by a moral vacuum that would be filled by fascism. And even though I cannot deny that yawn, a part of me wishes I could give this immensely evocative production four stars instead of three.