Spring Awakening | Theatre Production Archive

The Iron Warrior Press Release (1999)

Spring Awakening, written in 1890-1 is based, according to its author, on his own experiences at school and was written spontaneously and independently of any theatrical model. ‘I started to write,’ Wedekind tells us, ‘without any sort of plan, merely aiming to set down whatever appealed to me. The plan emerged after the third scene and was complied from my own personal experiences or the experiences of my class-mates.’ The story of the play features the suicide of a pupil who fails to cope with the exacting academic standards of his school, and the death of an innocent schoolgirl at the hands of a back-street abortionist, the victim of her own ignorance and her mother’s prudery. Spring Awakening shocked the contemporary public, and it may well still startle audiences today with its scenes of pubescent angst, sexual outpokeness and its frank representation of adolescent love- both hetero- and homosexual. The play was banned in Berlin in 1912, but its supporters found an unexpected ally in an enlightened judge of the Administrative Court who lifted the ban, and whose assessment of the play’s merit is still valid, although the social circumstances which gave rise to it may have altered radically. ‘The play,’ he wrote, ‘shows how the forces of real life affect innocent young people at the age of puberty, with particular reference to their own incipient sexuality and the demands made on them by life, and especially by their schooling. They perish in the ensuing conflict, because their appointed mentors, their parents and teachers, fail to guide them with proper understanding, because they are prudish and lacking in worldly wisdom…’