Melbourne’s The Hayloft Project has brought their innovative reworking of Frank Wedekind’s masterpiece of sexual discovery, Spring Awakening, to Sydney. Director Simon Stone spoke of Garrett Bithell.

Banned for almost a century after it was written in 1891, Spring Awakening is Frank Wedekind’s cutting attack on the repression of sexuality, and a brave investigation of the lasting conflict between animal instinct and social conditioning.

Set in a small provincial town at the turn of the 19th century, a group of school children struggle with their surprising sexual awakening. A gifted young man obsesses over the stirrings in his underpants while a young woman attempts to quell her indefinable, yet uncontrollable, desires. But the barriers to knowledge and experience passed down from their parents and teachers only hinder and exhaust them in their quest for sexual- and self enlightenment.

“When I was 18, I saw the play and it felt like someone who was over 100 years dead had been inside my brain, inside my body, and had seen all of the things I had gone through as a teenager,” director Simon Stone tells SX.

“I feel as if the repression of the free expression of information, especially the repression of the teenage sexual voice, as witnessed in the recent Bill Henson situation, is well and truly alive. At the core of this play is the eternal tension between our instincts as sexual beings and how we control those instincts in a society full of laws and moral assumptions. And that’s something people have been exploring since The Bacchae – the struggle between man as animal and man as social being.”

Indeed the timing of this remount is ideal to say the least. “It astounded me that the Henson thing happened at the very point we were about to put on this show,” Stone says.

“It’s such a coincidence because ironically this play was banned for over 80 years because it was deemed pornographic. So it’s almost the perfect parallel. I think it proves not so much that the stars are aligning, but that we will always be sensitive about teenage sexuality.

“The problem with the Henson thing is that it pushes teenagers into an area of non-sexuality, when really they know that they are sexual beings because of the things that are coursing through their bodies. The dangerous path we then go down is one of complete hidden shame, and that’s why I really love this play – because it’s a warning against suffocation.”

Stone hopes the play provokes an open dialogue about teenage sexuality. “I guess I’d like audiences to empathise with the teenage pubescent experience, and then realise that at the centre of all this furore about guarding our children from evil is actually a very, very confusing subjective experience. So shoving a moral blueprint on them will only make a very confusing time way more confusing.”

Frank Wedekind was a German playwright who often criticised bourgeois attitudes, particularly towards sex. It is often suggested that he anticipated expressionism, and he was a major influence on the development of epic theatre. His other plays include Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.

Says Stone: “We should never have the hubris of assuming that we have arrived at a place where we know best.”

Spring Awakening, downstairs at Belvoir Street Theatre until July 13. For bookings call the box office on 9699 3444 or online at belvoir.com.au

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