Reviews of Spring Awakening, Lyric Hammersmith and Enjoy, Gielgud (1)

Spring Awakening

Where: Lyric Hammersmith

When: To 14 March

Rating: 5/5

BOHEMIAN troublemaker Frank Wedekind's 1891 German Expressionist play has spent the last century being banned, cut to shreds and ignored.

Given it features teen sex, S&M, blossoming homosexuality, masturbation, abuse and abortion that’s not surprising.

What is surprising is how much of a huge hit the revamped 2006 Broadway musical version has been, scooping eight Tony awards and £35 million at the box office, despite featuring no star names and a 19th century German setting.

Well, now it's here, with a fresh young British cast - and guess what? It's breathtakingly, outrageously brilliant. It's period repression meets modern rock ethic; think Rufus Wainwright doing Grease.

As hormones, school pressures and sexual ignorance start to collide in a group of young teenagers, star pupil Melchior (Aneurin Barnard, wonderful) writes an essay on sex and shame to educate his best friend Moritz (Iwan Rheon, punk Prozac).

It’s all punctuated by songs that act as internal monologue. Whether in the uproarious Totally F***ed, or beautiful alt-rock numbers like Left Behind and The Dark I Know Well, with twinkling lightbulbs turning the Lyric into the Union Chapel, you’re aware of being at the start of something very, very special.

Grease and High School Musical be gone -  Spring Awakening holds the teen crown now.

-Kat Brown

Enjoy

Where: Gielgud, W1

When: to 2 May

Rating: 5/5

A fast flop when it was first premiered in the West End in 1980, Alan Bennett’s play finally returns as a certain hit. What ' s changed?  Partly it’s that Bennett himself has now become a national treasure as a playwright; but also his play about trying to preserve a fast-eroding way of family life, as it slips away under inner-city redevelopment and the watchful gaze of armies of social workers, resonates  nearly three decades on with humour and humanity. 

Played in Christopher Luscombe’s production like a cross between the Royle Family and a Mike Leigh film, the glorious Alison Steadman (another national treasure) as a woman slowly drifting into dementia,and David Troughton as her husband,bring great truth to it. This isn’t just the funniest, most thoughtful and unbearably poignant play in town – it’s the most enjoyable one, in every way.

-Mark Shenton