This version of Frank Wedekind's extraordinary play Spring Awakening was specially commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The themes it addresses and the sheer energy of the writing make this masterpiece of German symbolism startlingly relevant today.

With its scenes of pubescent angst, sexual outspokenness, rape and homosexuality, the play still, more than one hundred years after it was first staged, has the power to shock. Ted Hughes's rendition lends the dialogue a particularly modern terseness and bite, drawing out all the erotic energy of the original.