One can make a long list of Austrians who dug into the human dirty laundry, both psychological and real. Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek and Ulrich Seidl have become black sheep of the nation due to their depiction of the perverted, dark side of humans. Their fellow countryman Ferdinand Bruckner, a Freud’s contemporary, wrote “Pains of Youth” under an assumed name because of the controversial subject of the play. In this production of the Backa Theatre, adapted by Stefan Åkesson and brilliantly directed by Anja Suša, the play is as upsetting as almost 90 years before.
Life conditions have changed for the main characters in this play, who are a group of medical students desperately searching for the meaning of their lives. But much stays the same. Bruckner’s post-war Vienna at the threshold of the Second World War has been replaced by a modern, fast consumer society, where everything but happiness is accelerating. With the future and history on its shoulders, young people are on a journey to fulfil themselves, but for whom and what for?

Like animals in a cage, they are pacing around – at the same time they are their own prisoners and prison guards. In a half-finished house cluttered with moving boxes, they are drowning their anxiety in alcohol, sex and power games – and the cast’s performance is extraordinary.
A drunk Carl (Rasmus Lindberg) amuses himself by training Niko (Ramtin Parvaneh), an assistant, while a destructive Dessi (Emelie Strömberg) dreams herself back into her childhood, and a model-student Marie’s (Mia Ray) illusions are shattered by the unfaithful Bambi (Jonatan Rodriguez).
Add a number of crooning songs that result in an anxious cry and a Fritzl-inspired woman in a box and – Voila! – you have some of the ingredients for the darkest and most important youth production this winter, a production that takes the questions about human values, collective and individual responsibilities and loneliness to the extreme.

Four musicians in brown suits accompany the play with hard electronic music. Are they movers? Reminders of Europe’s Nazi past? Or the fascism of our own times? Regardless of that, this performance challenges us to come to terms with our own dirty laundry.

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.

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.