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Pains of Youth

Published Thursday 29 October 2009 at 11:40 by William McEvoy

Director Katie Mitchell and playwright Martin Crimp have produced extraordinary work in recent years - the 2008 production of The City for the Royal Court was a masterpiece. But something about this version of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play doesn’t quite work. Startling directorial insights and the distinctively cutting, oblique quality of Crimp’s writing aside, the characters remain perplexing, their emotions unstructured, the reason for their passions unexplained.

Fractured lives, sexual longing, manipulation and control are all themes in a play whose characters screen off their emotions, or reveal them all too histrionically. Several experience a powerful death drive or repress their sexuality in the name of science. Freud is ever present. Medical motifs recur - several of the young female characters are training as doctors - but so do pseudo-sciences like mesmerism and hypnosis.

At first, plastic sheeting covers the stage - these objects, even these people, might be exhibits in a museum, or specimens in a lab. Scene changes are stunning. They are tightly choreographed - an atmosphere of neurosis and hysteria created by jabbing, atonal music. Instruments sound like they’re being dropped downstairs. Key objects, a cigarette, a brandy glass, are brought onstage, unwrapped, set in place - the action is end-stopped, the characters jolt to life.

Despite Mitchell’s control of the actors’ positions and physicality - their bodies thrust forward in anger or edging backwards as they resist impulses - the play circles around in a frustrating way. A late interval destroys the momentum. Svengali character Freder (Geoffrey Streatfeild) isn’t charismatic or malevolent enough. Psychological inconsistency is one thing, but the characters don’t translate into other forms - abstract, symbolic, expressionistic. They feel chaotic and directionless, searching for meaning, as the audience is.

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