In a provincial German schoolroom, 19th-century pupils are sitting shamed and sullen. Suddenly, they yank hand mikes from black worsted jackets and begin yowling their souls out in 21st-century songs decrying “the bitch of living”. This boggling disjunction between period conformity and contemporary teenage trauma has made the musical Spring Awakening a Broadway success, and now its teenage kicks are heading for London. How does this unlikely show work?

1 What’s the story?

It’s based on a play by Frank Wedekind. Born in Germany in 1864, he was christened Benjamin Franklin Wedekind by his radical activist father. He wrote his first plays while working in an advertising agency, but all were rejected. He finally achieved stage success in Munich with the first of his Lulu plays, in which the free-loving heroine drives both men and women wild until she runs into Jack the Ripper. Wedekind married, unhappily, one of the first actresses to play Lulu and continued writing and touring in his sardonic, heartfelt plays, which clawed at social hypocrisies. He died in 1918.

2 A children’s tragedy

Wedekind’s children said that he treated them with a respect unusual for the period. Teenage suicide was an alarming social problem in Germany: in Prussia alone, 110 schoolboys killed themselves between 1883 and 1889. Spring Awakening mines the chasm between children and adults, the institutional hypocrisy ingrained at school. The kids are confused, rude, baffled by emerging desires. The adults seem grotesque because they, too, have been warped by a flawed upbringing and are unable to speak honestly to their children. The plot centres on three teenagers. Brainy Melchior tries to ease his friend Moritz’s worries about failure and puberty; Wendla’s mother won’t discuss where babies come from. Their schoolfriends are tormented by questions and hormones; there’s a rape, a suicide, an abortion. But Wedekind’s tone isn’t sensational: it’s cocky but crazy-mixed-up sad; desperately poetic, darkly ironic. The subtitle is “a children’s tragedy”, so by definition it’s an adult problem too.

3 A modern style is born

Wedekind pioneered is now known as the “telegram style”: lyrical shards of dialogue, speeding by like modern life itself. His contemporaries described him as “the first expressionist” for juxtaposing elliptical scenes as intense and baffling as the fast-changing world around them. He loved circus, cabaret and vaudeville, rather than realistic drama, and restlessly pushes scenes into caricature, poetry and bizarre symbolism.

4 Sex and censorship

Wedekind became an anti-establishment hero when he was banged up for six months after his satirical verses were accused of libelling Kaiser Wilhelm, and Spring Awakening has always been a trouble magnet. Published in 1891, it waited 15 years for its first performance, by the visionary director Max Reinhardt, and caused a sensation. It was banned during the first world war, then shunned by the Nazis. Even in Britain, it was refused a public staging until 1965. Wedekind argues for sexual honesty, but does he, as one critic suggests, advocate an “erotic utopia”? His pitch-black irony is unsettling: if desire tugs at his characters’ flesh, their troubled minds drag behind.

5 Underground and influential

Wedekind sang mordant ballads about sex crimes with the cabaret troupe the Eleven Executioners and appeared in his own plays. An observer described his convulsive performances as “flagellant, hypnotic and as gruesome as hari- kari”. For the young, Wedekind held a countercultural lure. A great devotee was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who called him “one of the great educators of the new Europe” and even named his son after him. At Wedekind’s funeral, itself a cult event, Brecht was surprised to see that the face in the coffin had lost its cynical expression: “around the mouth, he looked like a little boy”. Brecht is just one of the writers who ran with Wedekind’s discoveries: that people can be bifurcated by their spirit and society, that modern life is closer to rackety cabaret than to a well-made play, that wild noise and silence are as potent as speech. Berg’s fraught operas, Beckett’s wild, despairing comedy — all are Wedekind’s children.

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