Spring Awakening

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds/Touring

4 Stars

It is going to be a challenge for any other play this year to match the intensity of this production of Spring Awakening.

Frank Wedekind's controversial play provoked riots when it premiered in 1906 due to its subject matters of erotic fantasies, rape, suicide and homosexuality.

Anya Reiss's updated adaptation for Headlong is unlikely to incite such a strong reaction. But the moral questions Wedekind raises about how young people are shaped for their future by a generation that does not understand them remain as pertinent as ever.

In Reiss's version a group of confused teenagers variously struggle with fear of academic failure (Moritz Stiefel, played by Bradley Hall), sexual ignorance (Wendla Bergman, played by Aoife Duffin), and existentialism (Melchior Gabor, played by Oliver Johnstone) while inhabiting a world of coke bottles, mobile phones, explicit rap songs and easily accessible information.

This contemporaneity, brought vividly to life by Colin Richmonds's urban stage design, occasionally sits uneasily with the plays original period.

It is hard to believe, for instance, that Wendla would rely solely on her mother (Ruby Thomas) for sex education when other characters are zipping through YouTube to access porn and suicide videos.

Her sketchily drawn character, in common with the trajectory of Moritz towards suicide, is a weakness that is ameliorated by the clever way in which the teenagers' fears and hopes are seen to imperceptibly fade into the uncertain responsibilities of adulthood.

This is achieved by the actors playing both generations as they shift in and out of character from the teenager they are into the adult they will become.

If the individual stories lack roundness, the overall play nonetheless cranks up a breathless intensity as events becoming increasingly dark and confused.

The one-act format means there is no escape from the unrelenting catalogue of fate that befalls the characters - and the realisation that the mistakes of the past will thoughtlessly be passed on to the next generation.

Runs until March 22, box office: 0113 213-770, then tours until May 31, details: www.headlong.co.uk.