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Theatre Column: The Actor

The age of the children in Spring Awakening is one of the things that makes approaching their characters most difficult.

 

I remember very vividly being a thirteen year old and thinking of myself as an adult, angry when people treated me like a child. When I see a thirteen year old now it’s difficult to imagine ever having thought that way and it’s clear that a thirteen year old is not an adult, so you can’t approach the character as you would an adult one.  Something must be done to suggest youth, but once you’ve identified that age is an issue and that something of that age should be suggested somehow, the danger then becomes putting in too much and playing the children too young.

 

Although thirteen year olds aren’t adults, they aren’t really children either.  They have few of the attributes that make characterisation of very young children relatively straightforward. They don’t gurgle or drag their feet or struggle with their words or pick their noses as obviously as younger children do, for instance.  They are in a kind of grey area in between childhood and adulthood. In Spring Awakening this problem is made more complex by both the time and the style in which the play was written. To what extent is Frank Wedekind’s writing supposed to be seen and read as realist and how much is supposed to be taken as poetic license?

 

The young people in Spring Awakening and in particular my character Moritz, frequently use language I know I’ve never heard a thirteen year old use and don’t remember using myself when I was that age. But how much of this is a result of the time in which the play was written? How clever are the young characters in Spring Awakening and how much are they trying to look and feel clever amongst themselves?

 

I certainly remember times when I would try and make myself feel more mature around people I liked or wanted to impress and we see that on more than a few occasions in Spring Awakening.

 

Approaching the youth of the characters in Spring Awakening then isn’t straightforward. Beyond the issue of age, the characters in the play are quite complex. The play is dealing with very potent issues, some of which remain taboo even in modern British society. That the banning of the play in this country lasted for such a long time is testament to that.  I haven’t yet experienced and can only hope that I won’t experience some of the things that affect the young people in the play. Some of their issues at first seem quite alien to me, but I think that one of the most impressive things that the director Richard Jones has done with the cast is to ground those issues in experiences we ourselves have had, making them our own and feeling about them as we do about things which have affected us deeply in our pasts.

When you do that it’s difficult not to be pulled into the world of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening.  

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