18 May The Unbearable Loneliness of Youth

REVIEW/THEATRE. With its big existential questions, Pains of Youth takes young people’s breath away. Lis Hellström Sveningson reports on one more cutting-edge production by a Serbian director Anja Suša at the Backa Theater in Gothenburg.

Has it ever been easy to be young? During the premiere of the Backa theatre’s Pains of Youth I was struck by a memory from my own late teens: the feeling of being inside a transparent bubble, unable to punch a hole in it. And a world outside that is hard to understand.
In a set design by Helga Bumsch at the Backa Theatre, young people are trapped inside a Plexiglass cage. Some of them try to break down the walls. They take a run and climb up, but cannot get a hold and slide down again.
We often say that young people are the future, but what do we actually offer them? What does life really amount to? What does make life worth living? And what is a human being itself worth? It is big existential questions like these that take young people’s breath away in this play by Ferdinand Bruckner, written in between the two world wars. Stefan Åkesson’s adaptation – and a translation that has a contemporary ring to it – give us some up-to-date figures as an introduction. According to a risk analysis, a Swedish person’s life is worth more than 13 million Swedish crowns, while for Facebook the worth amounts to 805 crowns.

Seven young individuals find themselves stepping towards their own adult lives. Marie (Mia Ray) is ready to take her degree and she is decorating her house. However, her pure expectations of the future fall through, or should we say, are drowned in a predominantly resigned destructiveness that fills out the room. Her boyfriend (Jonatan Rodriguez) abandons her and hangs onto a tactfully ambitious Melissa (Ylva Olaison). The boozing and wicked social climber (played by Rasmus Lindgren) searches desperately for a foothold wherever he can smell a chance to get power, while Ulf Rönnerstrand’s phlegmatic philosopher is falling appart. An omnipresent agitator, like a ticking bomb, Emelie Strömberg’s young woman is constantly changing her clothes and posing. Everybody bullies Ramtin Parvaneh’s Niko – an incarnation of the exclusion itself.
When they cannot go any further, they draw paper bags over their heads. A means of escape so effective as the free-flowing alcohol and pumped-up eroticism.
Director Anja Suša works with strong images and expressive acting directions, but breaks off with distanced comments. The cast makes a great performance, with impressively high precision. Layering makes the subject edgy and striking, same as in Suša’s successful production of 5boys.com at the Backa Theatre a year or two ago.

Four Backa-musicians Stefan Abelsson, Anders Blad, Daniel Ekborg and Bo Stenholm make their contribution to the encouraging tone. Dressed in uniforms which combine the looks of guards and furniture movers, they rule the space between the plexiglas and the invisible future, and render a new sound to Igor Gostuški’s compostions that takes a disturbing direction straight into our times.

Lis Hellström Sveningson
Nummer, 09.12.2014.