"People should just shoot themselves at 17. Everything after is a disappointment."Written by Ferdinand Bruckner, the alias of the German Theodor Tagger, in 1929, Pains of Youth enters the rep at the Cottesloe Theatre and is the latest play to be directed at the NT by Katie Mitchell, known for her interpretative style and creative use of multimedia techniques, but only the former is in evidence here. It is presented in a new version by Martin Crimp, thereby renewing the creative partnership with Mitchell which has seen recent productions of works like The Seagull and Attempts on her Life, both also at the NT.
It is described as shocking and erotically-charged, which instantly means that it is neither of these things. Set in a Viennese boarding-house in 1923, a group of medical students negotiate the trials and tribulations of their sexually entangled lives, against the backdrop of the recently ended First World War. With an ever-revolving carousel of relationships and interactions, all are struggling to escape the disillusionment of their existence, but choose wildly different paths in order to achieve this.
The six students and one maid make up quite a dislikeable bunch of protagonists, there's a lot of self-indulgent flailing around and ridiculous posturing: "you only make love to your pain" being a personal favourite. This is not a problem in itself, but for the fact that their alleged decadence in their post-war malaise is really quite dull and I did not find it at all engaging, so I couldn't have cared less about any of them. For all the promise of erotic charge, there was very little sexual chemistry on stage between any of the characters, only Geoffrey Streatfeild coming close to exuding the necessary magnetism for his cruelly manipulative Freder.
However, there is an awful lot of this messing around with the plastic bags, and whilst the artier side of me could kind of see where they were going with this, the length it took to bag up every flower and teacup in the big scene change in Act 1 nearly drove me to just leaning over, grabbing one of the plastic bags and smothering myself so that I didn't have to sit through any more.
If the idea of people from the future putting on a fatally dull puppet show in which little of any interest happens, then this is the show for you. I couldn't really tell what Bruckner (or Crimp's) intent was in terms of story-telling: assuming this was the generation that was instrumental in allowing the rise of Nazism ten years later, the potential for an interesting look at the genesis of their complicity is surely there, but just not in a trite look at their bedhopping. Personally, I would save your money and look at your own plastic bags