Pains of Youth at the National Theatre, 9th September
Written by Ferdinand Bruckner
Directed by Katie Mitchell

When a piece of theatre promises in its advertising to be ‘erotically charged’ choosing the ideal plus one can be tricky. Probably best not to bring a family member of one of the cast or crew, or anyone you have a ‘past’ with for starters. So I scrolled though the names in my phone a few times before I decided on the perfect accomplice, someone who’d be bright and witty about it, and who I’d shared the experience of seeing a deer get hit by a car on a cinema screen the week before.  But it turned out that I spent the latter half of the first act secretly wishing the actors would get on with it and simulate sex if they were going to, and most of the second realising that the physics and chemistry between myself and my plus-one was more ‘charged’ than what was going on on stage.

It could be that Ferdinand Bruckner’s play is 80 years old and what moved loins then doesn’t titillate now, or it could be that Katie Mitchell’s direction lacked an understanding of human body language, so that however provocative and beguiling the words were they weren’y delivered with intent that meant business. And this production didn’t mean business: it hovered uncomfortably between the slight discord an audience can feel watching realistically simulated sex and the kind of clunky body language one sees in the lead up to an encounter on a porn film.

On stage, like in person, subtle is sexy. The nuances of physics and chemistry – and this play benefits from the backdrop of a medical academy, allowing for ever more beautiful innuendo potential – is what makes intimate personal encounters a distraction from everything else going on in the world. In the case of this play that means the disillusionment that blighted the world’s youth post First World War, and in the case of my own experience sitting with plus-one, from watching the play.

The Pains of Youth has everything, but it feels like it’s just ticking ‘everything’ off to prove it, like a list of classic male fantasies: lesbian temptation, manipulative men, Nietzsche quoting students, depressed beauties, lovers driven mad and a maid turned hooker. But this should have felt larger than an episode of the latest emo drama or hormonal horror, after all it pre-dates them all, and that’s the interesting bit. The Pains of Youth is in the tradition of many more familiar works: but it’s actually their grandparent – proving that we were all young once; this generation didn’t invent sex or angst, and that there are several generations – those before the release valve of pop music – who spent their teenage years living though political, violent turmoil as well as personal upheaval. Which is the stuff of real drama. When considered in the context of the 1920s, the bold talk and even bolder actions of the play’s six youths is more than interesting enough to procure attention. Especially seeing as the play didn’t adopt a modern setting, just some questionable futuristic scene change devises – questionable because though graceful it was difficult to see why they’d been employed to break up the scenes.

Sexually liberated Desiree (Lydia Wilson) tries to pack everything into her highs before she swings back to lows demanding suicide, her perfectionist room mate, Marie (Laura Elphinstone) gets ensnared in the net of love, desire and getting things done, similarly does Irene (Cara Horgan), Petrell (Leo Bill) spouts wisdom learned from philosophy texts and Freder (Geoffrey Streatfeild), is a charming sexual and emotional predator, who uses maid Lucy’s (Sian Clifford) love for him into moonlight career as a streetwalker. These are six characters on the cusp of life of all kinds, or careers, of love, of violence, and they’re all striving to get the most out of themselves and their surroundings, at that point where youth is finally so close to burnt out that it seems precious.

These characters are living for themselves and there should be plenty of tension evident in that. Many encounters should have been a feast for all the senses, but their levels of audible and visual angst rans so high for so long that it was like listening to the same song on repeat for too long in your bedroom – yes, the emotion is still there, but you never get anything else out of it, and it became a bit of a foregone conclusion. While the forces at play between myself and my plus one remained distractingly open ended.

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