At Least Afloat

★★★★✬

Daniel Fischer and Hattie Summers as Melchior and Wendla performing “The Word of Your Body” in Paradok’s Spring Awakening. Photo: Beau Wolton, @beauwoltonisonline

I would just like to celebrate that this is the first review I have been asked, and have not volunteered, to make. The email from the Co-Producer addressed to “the Editor” flew into my inbox as a welcome homing pigeon, a breath of the Spring of a new profession – that of the critic. I really don’t mind if I do. Watching plays and thinking about them is probably my favourite activity in the world.

Thus – the somewhat harried for slings-and-arrows reasons – I strode into Bedlam, armed this time with a notepad and blazer, and the ability to say “I am the Press”.

Reader, I needed but my youthful sensibilities (and my slings-and-arrows) to appreciate the relevance of this play. The fresh, wounding relevance of this play.

Spring Awakening, for the green and uninitiated (as I was), is is a folk+alt-rock musical by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, based off the play of the same name by Frank Wedekind that was published in 1891. As the title suggests, it is about youth and nascence.

I will confess I sat through the first number “Mama Who Bore Me” with skepticism. The predominant theme in dance, as I found with later songs, were hands. Reaching, repressed hands; out-of-sync, jarring-with-my-4-years-in-competitive-dance hands. Ooooooooooh… No, but, sit tight. Don’t dismiss the bizarre and unconvincing movement yet. The awkwardness of the dancing, the lack of synchronicity in coordination could be considered a metaphor for adolescent awkwardness. As can the lack of conviction in swearing (“Totally F*cked”), fresh, new, and powerful in the mouth of a child embracing their adulthood… Disjointed, uncertain. No, at times it felt like the mainly twenty-something-year-old cast disconnected with increasingly distant memories of a pubescence buried. But, my word, what a play!

See it as a metaphor. Of course, our mouths are dirty, as are increasingly less our minds, through our enfranchised bodies of several years. We are educated and experienced. We are more free. Ours is not exactly the situation, in age or in historical context, of the 19th century personae. But we still aren’t completely free. We still have much to desire. We still are at the mercy of adults (“proper” adults, in our case, with financial autonomy and political sway).

(Hello, Bella, how is Edinburgh student life treating you?)

It’s an exceedingly powerful text and score, which does make it difficult to extricate how well it was delivered.

The set, initially, seems simple – There is a screen of white chiffon at the back, two dark legs at the side, a line of seven chairs on stage. The chiffon is used for projection of the soloists, concert-style; surveillance-style. The legs, it turns out, are not simply blackcloth, but school ties, red satin, bras, tous entassés. Then we see people walk behind the chiffon. Talk behind the chiffon. Make sweet, illicit love behind the chiffon. The chairs are, of course, chairs. They are a classroom. They are a bridge over a bubbling, vernal brook. They are a bridge between the respectable world and reformatory. They are a church pew. The chiffon becomes the veil between two worlds – the seen and unseen, the permitted and the forbidden, the construed and the truth. Oh! And I am in raptures over the final detail I noticed – whitewash. Graffiti. Projected onto the chiffon. The wavy patterns almost suggesting the two-fingers-up-to-the-Church that Michelangelo hid in plain sight in the Sistine Chapel: The shape of Adam and God – the brain. I am allowed to let my artistic, intellectual mind wonder.

You know what? Yes. “I Believe”, in the words of the ephemeral Wendla Bergmann, played by Hattie Summers. Increasingly, I am drawn in. Daniel Fischer has a voice which catches in your chest, in a good way, as do his words (“Shame is the product of nothing but our education.”). In Melchior Gabor, he embodies the mind that sees but finds that sight mismatches with hearing. The Adults, Sophie Davis and Ben Urbach, purposely nameless and universal, portrayed each of their authoritative roles, as parents and teachers, with a violence, physical or moral, stemming from a very palpable fear. Not even an ignorance – a blindness through fear. Through love primarily and often, but ultimately through fear. None of us ever grow up – we merely learn to hold the reins with greater force. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Shaun Hamilton’s pathos slammed my eyes shut during Moritz Stiefel’s suicide, as did it draw tears. Gemima Iseka-Bekano as Ilse is still as brilliant as she was when I first saw her in EUSOG’s HMS Pinafore in 2023, or even coming into fuller bloom of her talents. I will not be surprised to find her as a mighty oak in the West End in the coming decade, if that is what she wishes. I really cannot criticise anything about any of the actors, beyond their troupe dancing, occasionally their singing (due to the complexities of the songs), and perhaps their ability to portray 15-year-olds with sufficient conviction, but the order was towering, for six months rehearsals beside degrees (and slings-and-arrows). In this case, as musical theatre, the show is certainly not to professional standard, but it’s pretty d*mn close. As experimental theatre, as a play, it’s excellent. Everything that could be done with thought, was done with intricate, incisive thought, for this is a play of symbolism. From the choreographed clock hands, to the broken rosary in the switch scene, to the individualised grunge costumes (made possible in collaboration with Glasgow’s House of Black), each pointing to a different personality, each with a common theme. Also important to mention is the choice to work with University of Edinburgh sexual consent and safety campaign Sex? On Campus!.

The librettist and composer had big shoes to fill, and so did the production team and crew, and so do the actors. Upon further reflection, they did so admirably. “Listen to what’s in the heart of a child, A song so big in one so small.”

A song of trying to find our way in the world, particularly pressing for me who is finishing their undergraduate degree and knows not whether to stay for a Master’s at this fraught University of ours. Let us sing, O ye who hold the (purse) strings, who decide our future with your fearful and greedy actions. Do you hear us?

“Are we so afraid of the truth that we will join the ranks of cowards and fools?”

Now, I would say get tickets for the show whilst you still can, but they sold out ere I could pick up my pen. And deservedly.

Nonetheless, for form’s sake (and if you are exceedingly lucky):

Spring Awakening is being performed at Bedlam Theatre, 11b Bristo Place, EH1 1EZ, at 7.30pm, from the 12th until the 15th March 2025. Tickets can be bought here or at the door.