OUR teenage years are often the ones we’d like to forget.
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But, in a University of New England adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play Spring Awakening – audiences will be dragged straight back to the uncomfortable years of their youth.
The play is about the struggle to grow up when nobody will tell you the truth about anything, said director Chris Hay.
“There are some parts of it that feel like an after-school special, because you’ve got essentially one character who wants to know about sex but her mother has decided she’s far too young to know that and keeps putting off the discussion,” he said.
“Essentially at its heart, they’re all thinking about their identities and how they go about building them.”
Originally set in Germany in the 1890’s, director Chris Hay has fast-forwarded a century in his adaptation, to the pre-mobile phone, pre-Internet era of the 1990’s.
“It’s very much about the Victorian model of child-rearing, you know, children should be seen but not heard,” Mr Hay said.
“You’ll recognise yourself either in the parents or the children, in that sense that you just want to know what people aren’t telling you.”
With a cast of more than 20, the director said one of the biggest challenges was getting the young cast to reconnect with their teenage years.
Describing his directing style, Mr Hay said he wanted the story to resonate with the people performing the story.
“I think if you can help the actors connect with the story then that helps the audience – so my style is quite still and quite contained,” Mr Hay said.
“You can see from the set it’s about images and stillness.”
Performed among children’s playground equipment, the set is whimsical in nature and invites the audience to revisit their youth.
It is Mr Hay’s first directing role at the University of New England.
Describing the original as a “mixed bag”, his interpretation is much the same, but the language has been adapted to make it more accessible to the audience.
“It’s one of those plays where the writer has really thrown everything, all of his ideas at the wall – and just seen what sticks,” Mr Hay said.
“There are some sections that are incredibly funny, others are really quite confronting.
“But, as a whole the subtitle of the play is A Children’s Tragedy, that’s kind of the idea – it’s a critique of the way society looks at children. “I think audiences should be prepared for some home truths about what it is like to be a teenager.” Spring Awakening is on until September 23, phone 6773 3061.