Punk Rock (Schauspielhaus Graz)

Full cast of Punk Rock

This review is for the Premiere performance of Punk Rock, written by Simon Stephens, and directed by Stefan Behrendt. This production was performed by the 3rd Year acting students from the Kunst Universität Graz and played on the Probe Bühne at the Schauspielhaus Graz.

A play about a group of senior high school students performed by a group of junior university students. Not a bad idea, let the actors show their own angst through the angsty characters. That I suppose was the main idea for having this group of students perform Simon Stephen's Punk Rock, according to the added prologue performed by  Friederike Majerczyk. The prologue told the audience about the grueling schooling the acting students have been going through at the Kunst Universität and that they are dealing with massive anxiety due to their chosen perfession, "There are about 200 acting students graduating each year in the german-speaking world and about 8 fix ensemble positions at the state theatres". On one side, this gets the audience to sympathsize with the actors and maybe not view their acting as critically as a perfessional, or maybe it was meant to draw parallels with the script so that we would see that the circumstance of the play also could happen in any student's daily life. Either way I found the addition of this prologue rather odd and annoying, particularly because the actor (Majerczyk) looked as if she was going to throw up from fear....which also was the case during her short scene as psychiatrice - there is a reason she had the smallest part. Yes, I know that was somewhat cruel...but I was irritated by her delivery, I felt awkward watching her and in all my studies and performances that I've watched, I have never felt uncomfortable watching a performer before. As for the rest of the cast, I believe they did well telling the story and embodying the characters. However, on the whole the group somehow couldn't manage to truely speak to one another. Every actor was playing for himself and not playing with their scene partner, the exception being Jaan Luca Schaub (Chadwick Maede). Schaub was fresh, active and truly engaged with any and every scene partner, a pleasure to watch.

Chadwick (Schub) bullied by Francis (Schiffkorn)

Stage design and costume truly gave the feel of a English private school, but the direction could have done more the have the actors behaving like British youth because they are not the same as Austrian youth. Direction, all in all, was ok, but I did ask myself why all the actors were sitting on the stage for the entire performance, it didn't really add much to the performance except distractions. Sometimes I felt like this was an attempt to just show off the various actors instead of really telling the Punk Rock story.

If you aren't friends/family with the cast, or a serious teen drama fan you can skip this performance and save your money for something with more substance (like Onkel Wanja or Werther for instance).

Overall: 5/10