‘Youth without God’ is a chilly and, at times, chilling play. It’s adapted by Christopher Hampton from Austrian writer Ödön von Horváth’s novel of the same name, published in 1938 as the Nazi regime continued to tighten its propagandist grip on German life.
The Teacher (suitably morally slippery, as played by Alex Waldmann) is our narrator of a story with allegorical overtones. We meet him cynically awarding high marks to essays by his students, simply because they parrot ‘official’ views. It’s a surveillance state of indoctrinated children: his criticism of one student, Otto Neumann, for using the N-word, results in threats from the boy’s father.
The Teacher accompanies his students on a trip to the mountains. Against a backdrop of industrial decay and poverty, Neumann argues with another boy, Robert Ziegler, who – The Teacher discovers by secretly reading his diary – is seeing a local homeless girl. (Like the few female characters in this very male play, she’s mostly kept at arm’s length). Neumann is later found dead.
The best part of director Stephanie Mohr’s stark, stylised staging is its portrayal of the most disturbing schoolboys this side of William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. Moving pack-like, hissing nationalist anthems at us, they’re a blank-faced nightmare of the future. Nicholas Nunn is skin-crawling as Dieter Trauner, a grinning emptiness of a boy who The Teacher suspects of killing Neumann.
Horváth’s deep anger at the stifling of dissent and a church that is complicit in protecting privilege courses through Hampton’s adaptation. While Hitler and Nazism aren’t explicitly named, their influence is pervasive. But the script often feels strained when it tackles this head-on, awkwardly caught between stage and novel page.
‘So, the world seems to be spiralling towards disaster again, doesn’t it?’ The Teacher asks at the start of this portrayal of the deep roots of fascism. ‘Youth without God’ is unwieldy and overwritten at times, but that weary sense of history repeating is sharply familiar.