18 May “Pains of Youth” at the Backa Theatre

Kulturnytt
Published on Wednesday, 17th December 2014 at 08:00
Maria Edström

As a guest of the Backa Theatre in 2012, Serbian director Anja Suša made a great success with her production of “5boys.com”, which is about a group of young boys playing war. The Backa Theatre and Suša have now come together again with Ferdinand Bruckner’s play “Pains of Youth”, translated and adapted by Stefan Åkesson, with music by Igor Gostuški. Maria Edström reports on the performance.
Last time it was adult women who played young boys – the boys that played war in Anja Suša’s guest production. Once again, Suša’s unique theatre aesthetics fits the Backa Theatre’s cast like a glove. This time with a witty, cynical and vibrating play about young people, written in the turbulent period of the Weimar Republic. Bruckner’s 1929 play “Pains of Youth” was also destroyed in the Nazi book bonfire in 1933. Bruckner himself emigrated soon afterwards.
Here at the Backa we have left Weimar for some kind of contemporary time among moving boxes, plexiglas and books on “how to achieve success”. Six young individuals, many of them medical students, celebrate Marie’s (played by Mia Ray) birthday. Their longing, obsession with death, resignation, horniness and the feeling of worthlessness become an episode of “Friends” or “Girls”, however immersed in hydrochloric acid, amplified to the maximum in its artistic quality and with 1920’s bitter wise-cracks that make contemporary jokes sound prudish and upright.
And the cast is completely extraordinary in its flow, in the manner in which they glide along in Anja Suša’s theatrical tapestry which she weaves with bodies, voices and relations. Ylva Olaison’s Melissa that steals Marie’s boyfriend John (played by Jonatan Rodriques) right there at the party, Emelie Strömberg’s Desiree that is drawn to both Marie and Rasmus Lindgren’s Carl, who himself has a little unpleasant exploitative relationship with Niko (played by Ramtin Parvaneh) who is selling himself on the Internet, as well as Ulf Rönnerstrand’s Jakob, bearded and most often cynical. Time is flowing and stopping. It is simultaneously going too slowly and too quickly, like it usually does when we are young.
For there is something timeless, melancholic and beautiful that makes me suddenly recall that feeling of euphoria, restlessness and sadness – we never mourn our lives as much as we do when we are young, when life has not yet really begun. And if the future casts long shadows and opens a precipice at our feet, it becomes almost too terrifying to be young – it used to be for the youth in the Weimar Republic, as it may be for the youth today.