DIRECTOR’S NOTES

Pains of Youth is set in Vienna in the 1920s, where a group of young
people living in a boarding house is studying to become doctors. In a tiny room
of one of those students, they try to live, they try to love, and they try to
care. But there’s this disease that seems to have taken root in those young
women and men. This kind of existential sickness that leads them to ask
themselves if it is actually worth it to come of age. To become part of a world
that seems to be collapsing under their feet. Authority structures are starting
to crumble in front of a kind of fascism that’s both political and emotional,
and the characters in Pains of Youth get caught in a time and place where it
seems impossible to see ahead. That makes them dangerous and volatile. While
trying to find rules and laws that replace those that they consider obsolete,
they get caught in a game that is bound to end badly. 

Written with a forensic eye, this play dances around themes like love,
sex, manipulation, power, and morality with clinical precision, showing us a
slice of reality as if it were an operation room, and containing the whole
world inside a tiny little room that Marie, our main character, tries to keep clean
and spotless at all times. In the end, as said by one of the characters in the
play, the only alternatives these characters have left are bourgeois existence,
or suicide.

Jordi Casado i Olivas