Pains of Youth

Six sexually entangled students, both men and women, are training to be doctors in Vienna in 1923. Like medics today, they both play and work hard, they also share feelings of despair and disillusionment. Soon that emptiness will be filled by the certainties of fascism. Ferdinand Bruckner wrote his troubling and prescient play, now presented in a new version by Martin Crimp, in 1926. On the day that Marie (Laura Elphinstone) graduates as a doctor, she is rejected by the man she loves, seduced by Desiree who is enthralled by the idea of suicide, and proposed to by the manipulative Freder who she loathes.

Katie Mitchell's scrupulous, engrossing production is like a scientific experiment. We are invited to examine the student doctors' behaviour just as they examine their patients' tubercular cavities. Between the scenes, the setting is changed by actors who appear to be investigating the scene of a crime. They wear latex gloves, wrap objects in polythene bags and adjust the characters' postures. As always with Mitchell, the audience feels as if it is eavesdropping on intimate conversations especially when Lydia Wilson's disturbing Desiree is luring Marie into bed. It helps to keep such a distance. In less assured hands, Desiree's pronouncement that 'Everyone should shoot themselves at 17' could easily sound risible and Geoffrey Streatfeild's power-loving Freder, who so mesmerises a serving girl that she happily goes on the game, might seem like a pantomime villain instead of a credible person. Those who complain that Mitchell needs to lighten up will have to be patient and wait for her production of 'The Cat in a Hat' to open.