“Spring Awakenings” in Luxembourg
Dana Rufolo in Luxembourg City
18 May 2025
In 1891, when Frank Wedekind wrote Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), sexual mores in his native Germany were severe and irrationally impervious to the physiological urges and needs of the budding bodies of the pre-adult generation. His play was censored significantly because he took an honest look at how society was imprisoning its young, locking them into a kinship system where they were owned by their parents and had no independent visions of their life at a time when the call for self-determination started to become loud and insistent. Wedekind’s play is a tragedy, with a vivacious young girl dying from a botched abortion and a young man riddled with guilt committing suicide. We would never have a similar situation these days, right? Or would we?
Photo credit: Alfonso Salguei.
Yes, and no. Wedekind’s drama, playing throughout May 2025 at Luxembourg City’s Théâtre des Capucins, has been wonderfully adapted by author Antoine Pohu and director Anne Simon, both Luxembourgish, not only to the current era but also to the country of Luxembourg with its multilingualism and plurality of national identities. It brings the issues of the original Frühlings Erwachen up to date for the local population but also internationally, since youth today are being bombarded with similar messages wherever they are.
Spring Awakenings focuses on the weakened authority of adults and the increasingly invasive mobile phone use that results in mobbing and an adolescent need for copycat sameness in order to feel accepted. Themes of homosexuality, pregnancy and abortion are also discussed.
The nine adolescents on stage playing students come directly from Luxembourgish schools. They were involved in what Simon calls “participatory playwriting”. Among these were actors of talent, in particular the female lead who plays the role of Wendla when it is Wedekind’s play that is discussed; a major part of the action takes place during a school class. The most prominent adult character in the play is the well-known Luxembourgish actor Jules Werner who plays the teacher with insight and precision. He vacillates between currying favour with his students (including some kind of manosphere talk with the boys in the class, which seemed somewhat out of character) and asking that they think about moral integrity. Cleverly, as a play within a play, his students are reading Frühlings Erwachen and enacting scenes from the play in the class.
In Wedekind’s play, when Wendla becomes pregnant, her mother coldly thinks only of how this affects the family’s social standing and orders a midwife to perform an abortion that will kill her daughter. In Spring Awakenings, the same student who enacts the role of Wendla in class will be seduced by a classmate, and their entire lovemaking in the beauty and solitude of nature (or so they think) is filmed by a fellow student using his mobile; he then shows the video to the other classmates. This parallel shows that cruelty is no longer generational today. The parents in Wedekind’s play are cold and uncaring, but the two mothers (both played by Brigitte Urhausen) portrayed in Pohu’s interpretation are compassionate and tolerant. Now, cruelty is inflicted by members of the same generation who jealously control each other’s actions.
Simon is a director known for her dynamic stage concepts. She often uses kinetic objects in delicate balance to portray the uneasy truce between characters onstage who are somehow competing with one another. In Spring Awakenings, her set designer Ágnes Hamvas created a jungle-gym set with a see-saw and a light-studded circle that functions as a swing. The teacher often stood at the base of one side of the see-saw, counterbalancing several of his students who are suspended in the air, but as the balance of powers shift, so does the see-saw.
The action is intense, singer Edsen comes on stage to belt out songs, characters don masks and remove them in apt response to the social roles inflicted upon them. Youthful heads pop out of curtains, presumably to indicate that they are communicating by chat groups, an endless array of LED lights twinkles and sometime blinds the audience, and the curtain is a colourful display of moving emojis. All the movement – all the acting, enacting, playing, flowing, coping, studying, pretending – leaves no (private, reflective) time to feel or to understand. In this sweep of motion, a sort of frenzy, the truth of both Wedekind’s play and Pohu’s adaptation comes out: young ones just awakening to adulthood in our society are suppressed and contained, just like they were 100 years ago.
