L’Éveil du printemps

A scandalous success/a text that is both subversive and modern.

Frank Wedekind’s play deals with a theme rarely found in the theatrical repertoire, the awakening of the senses, desire and sexuality in adolescence. Written in 1891 and premiered in 1906 by Max Reinhardt, it sparked outrage in Prussian society at the time, which dismissed it as pornographic and censored it strongly. Sigmund Freud was alone in praising this so-called expressionist work in the midst of the deluge of insults it attracted. Jacques Lacan followed Freud, writing a preface to the play in 1974. In France, it wasn’t until 1966 that the play was first staged, directed by Jean-Marie Serreau at the Théâtre de Poche - Montparnasse.

The rules of propriety forbade any direct allusion to sexuality in the classical repertoire, all the more so with regard to children and adolescents, long a taboo.

While Shakespeare’s theatre abounds in bawdy episodes, in French it was performed only after undergoing mutilations that expunged lines and stage routines deemed shocking for a public little inclined to appreciate them until the end of the nineteenth century. Romeo and Juliet in particular depicts young people in the blush of first love. In the French repertoire, the plays that more specifically address the awakening of desire in adolescents do so by allusion. L’Oracle by Saint-Foix (1740) or some of Marivaux’s plays, in particular La Dispute (1744), evoke this theme in a roundabout way: as in L’École des femmes, when children are raised in seclusion from the world, in ignorance of their fellows, the discovery of matters of love comes as quite a shock. Sexuality, even when only hinted at, is sometimes enough to provoke violent controversies, such as the quarrel surrounding L’École des femmes, a play accused of obscenity. Beaumarchais’The Marriage of Figaro (1784) shows, in Chérubin, a very young man in love, but the intensity of his nascent desire, which is expressed directly in certain contemporary interpretations, was softened in its first production by the practice of having young actresses play the roles of adolescent males, a tradition that continued up to the twentieth century. The inversion of the sexes thus prevented any overly radical reading. One can also mention Chekhov’sThe Seagull, whose Nina character is also at this very particular time of the discovery of the senses.

Wedekind, who remains somewhat unfamiliar in France, is undoubtedly a forerunner and only Thomas Mann and hisToni Kröger (1903) come to mind as a comparable example of a literary work that goes so far in intertwining contradictory desires, the weight of society, religion and education. The theme of burgeoning sexuality has since regularly featured in contemporary theatre, and it has particular significance in the work some authors, such as in that of Bernard-Marie Koltès (Roberto Zucco, Quai Ouest).