Philip Larkin was certainly wrong in saying that sex only began in 1963. The six students and a servant portrayed in Ferdinand Bruckner's The Pains of Youth, written in 1926, all seem perpetually sexually rapacious, as, pace Larkin, students probably always have been. But have they always been so single-mindedly and vociferously desirous of pain and death? Bruckner's characters are homogenously nihilistic and self-destructive. 
      The play is set in a lodging-house, during and just after the end of term exams in medicine, and students and servant alike gravitate around two central forces - a manic-depressive countess (Miranda Raison) and the free-thinking student, Freder (strongly performed by Mel Raido) who is her occasional lover and who had originally persuaded her to run away from her opulent home. These two personalities - amoral, ruthless and full of furious pessimism - corrupt and destroy themselves and the others. But they had all seemed pretty much condemned to perdition anyway. 
      Perhaps this unrelieved nihilism of the play's protagonists could be excused as manifesting its author's presience - the play was written seven years before Hitler came to power - but in fact it seems totally apolitical or time-anchored; instead intending to present a universal and ubiquitous portrayal of youth. For a middle-aged reviewer, youth's forgotten intensity and extremity were indeed intermittently re-evoked, but Bruckner seemed to have forgotten that being young was not all sturm und drang, and that there was ecstasy also. This is not a state that any of his characters ever seem to experience, nor do they induce any feelings of sympathy or sorrow for their much harped-on sufferings. 
      Ultimately, whatever it seems to promise, the play is all on one note, and turns out to be unconvincing, melodramatic and alienating.
Jane O'Grady