Pains of Youth
National Theatre, London
The Roaring Twenties was a great time to be a rebel. With the Russian Revolution still a beacon of hope, there seemed to be no limits to the possible. But, as Austrian playwright Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth makes clear, there were already intimations of catastrophe.
Set in 1923 in Vienna, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler as well as the crucible of modernism, the play looks at seven young people – most of whom are medical students – who find the air of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire’s capital city is a heady mix of the sexually invigorating and the morally asphyxiating. It’s as if Egon Schiele met Sigmund Freud at a madhouse performance of La Ronde.
Any plot summary risks becoming bathetic, with high art reduced to the status of soap opera, but here goes anyway: Marie is about to graduate from medical school when she finds out that her boyfriend Petrell has fallen for another student, the lower-class Irene. So she turns for consolation to her neighbour, the aristocratic Desiree. Meanwhile, young Freder is busy seducing the housemaid Lucy. Add Marie’s mentor Alt and this tale of disillusionment and decadence soon begins to bubble.
Written by Bruckner (the pseudonym of Theodor Tagger) in 1926, this is a masterpiece of European theatre. Like a laboratory experiment, the play heats up an alembic of desire, creating an enchanting atmosphere where deranged fantasies, suicidal inclinations, easy blasphemy and sadistic acts spurt and splutter.
Here, at the high noon of modernism, are all the familiar elements of progressive culture: artistic sensibility, naive orientalism and industrial aesthetics. As the dialogues of these young people ring with contempt for the bourgeois life and a lust for revolt, there’s a sense of life lived at fever pitch: hectic and almost nightmarish. Down with the old, in with the new.
Martin Crimp’s elegant English version – which was originally entitled The Discontented – evokes the existence of bohemian youth, with its erratic emotional swings, late-night conversations and attraction towards sexual experiment. As these medics dissect their lives, you feel a real yearning for truth and a true urge towards cruelty, especially with Freder and Irene, as well as tenderness, especially with Marie and Desiree.
As directed by Katie Mitchell, the play radiates a heightened sense of life. Instead of a dull costume drama, she has created a style of movement and talk that suggests a lost world without losing any of its emotional truth. The effect is a bit like peering at a faded silent film, although designer Vicki Mortimer’s colour palette is richly warm, with its autumnal browns, lamplit glows and ochre shadows.
The acting, by a young ensemble which includes Laura Elphinstone (Marie), Geoffrey Streatfeild (Freder), Lydia Wilson (Desiree) and Sian Clifford (Lucy), build up a coherent sense of a highly stylised world. Even when they are still, an electric current runs through the group. Committed, convincing and a little uncanny, the cast inhabit a hectic mindspace where the yearning for excitement clashes with the violence of truth. Like a wild mix of hash oil and velvety claret, the result is young, young, young. But by the 1930s, however, bohemian youth was destroyed by the new moralism of Hitler and Stalin.
Aleks Sierz
