Spring Awakening @ Playhouse, Liverpool, 13-17 May

In 1891 German playwright Frank Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening, a play questioning the sexual, physical and emotional difficulties faced by society's younger generation. The world was not quite ready for so provocative a work. Revolutionary in both content and structure, Spring Awakening would wait 15 years for its first staged production – only for it to be banned immediately.

In 1964 the National Theatre attempted to mount a full version of the play but was stopped after a row that came close to causing a permanent split between the theatre's board and its creative team. The argument was led by Laurence Olivier, who believed the National had a duty to stage radical work and battled to get the play past the official censor. A compromise was reached with the deletion of some scenes, but the board of the National decided not to stage the play anyway.

The world is ready now. Led by artistic director Jeremy Herrin, theatre company Headlong has brought Wedekind's definitive play about youth and sexuality bang up to date with the help of award-winning young playwright Anya Reiss (winner of both the Evening Standard and the Critics’ Circle Awards for Most Promising Playwright) and director Ben Kidd. Unnerving, entertaining and unashamedly dark, this revised version examines the exuberance, intensity and confusion of teenage life today.

Following recent sell-out productions of new plays Chimerica and The Effect, and their remarkable reworkings of 1984, The Seagull, and Romeo and Juliet, Headlong are undoubtedly on a roll. Co-produced by West Yorkshire Playhouse and Nuffield, this promises to be a tremendous piece of theatre that will stay with audiences long after the curtain has fallen. [Alecia Marshall]