Spring Begins with Controversy

Every university is filled with societies; the Norwegian society, the LGBT society, the film society. But the drama society at Roehampton, known to the students as the Roehampton Players, have been the centre of attention on campus recently.

They decided to shake off the winter chills with their production of 'Spring Awakening'. It was their first time producing the musical and taking into consideration their sold-out shows of 'Guys and Dolls' and 'Rent' over the past few years, the show was expected to be successful.

I wanted to make this blog post because 'Spring Awakening' isn't your usual classic fun and bouncy musical. It's a controversial German play that was written by Frank Wedekind and adapted into a rock and roll musical for Broadway by Duncan Sheik and Steven Satar in 2006. It tackles the themes of teenage sexuality, abuse and suicide, which caused it to be banned in Germany and vastly censored in the UK when it was first released.

This type of play could have caused many issues for the Players, which led to my interest to write about it for the Journalism module on my course and in telling you all about it on this blog. 

The Players are no strangers to controversy. Last year they decided to produce 'Rent' which explores sexuality as well as drug abuse, so the campus already had a good idea what they were walking into.

But when I entered the campus theatre last night and the lights went down my stomach flipped. I'm close friends with the Vice President of the society and I had interviewed various members of the cast for my Journalism piece, so I felt a deep connection to the play already. However, even I didn't know how it would be portrayed on the stage.

When the lights came back on I stood from my seat and clapped until my hands hurt. There were tears in my eyes after the emotional ending and I was proud of the society for producing such a daring play with such confidence.

For my Journalism assignment I interviewed Abbie Mccrone, the lead actress in the play and the President of the society, where she said: ‘This makes youngsters know they're not weird and that things like homosexuality shouldn't be frowned upon,' and in the performance they showed no fear when they tackled homosexual relationships, a teenagers struggle with suicide and an on-stage sex scene without fear or hesitation.

I think that the open representation of sexuality and issues of all kinds on a university campus is incredibly courageous and necessary. So many young people come to university plagued with troubles and scared to express themselves. They're surrounded by new people that may judge who they are or what they think and there's so much controversy in the media and in society that people are afraid to be who they truly want to be. 

The Roehampton Players tackled this problem head on with an emotional but ballsy performance, sticking up a middle finger (literally for one of the musical numbers) to anyone who dared to contradict their choice. Though this a cautionary tale for parents who don't talk to their children about sexuality and teenagers who act without thinking, it is also so much more for the audience and the people involved.

As Matthew Hudson, the President of the LGBT society, told me for my Journalism assignment: 'Love is love, a kiss is a kiss, no matter who it is between,' the Roehampton Players certainly proved that this weekend in their performance and sent out a lasting message: 

Be who you want to be, do what you want to do, and leave behind those who think being different is bad.