For anyone who thinks that today’s students are badly behaved, Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth should prove an eye-opener. Bruckner’s play depicts a group of wealthy students in 1920s Vienna, who bed-hop, pop pills, drink excessively and generally rebel against bourgeois society.

While this could make for a passionate, highly charged evening, Katie Mitchell’s new production in the Cottesloe is a deliberately muted affair. Here these young people appear old before their time. Nihilistic and self-obsessed, they are the representatives of a disillusioned and doomed generation, trapped between two world wars and unable to escape the shadow of death.

There is a forensic quality to the play, heightened in Mitchell’s production by the scene changes during which the characters, transformed into sober-suited operatives, bag up props, swathe furniture in plastic sheeting or lay out the drugs with which they will anaesthetise themselves. These young people are analysing their own self-destruction. The contrast between the soft, sepia-lit, super-naturalism of the action and these clinical, harshly lit interludes, accompanied by restless 12-tone music, links the play too to the experimental art movements of the period. We see both youth and morbidity, convention and rebellion, and we observe the action dispassionately, as if the medical students themselves were laboratory specimens.

Intellectually, then, it is fascinating. As an experience in the theatre, it is pretty hard work. Vicki Mortimer’s attractive cream and brown, wood-panelled set makes a handsomely naturalistic interior and Mitchell’s production rolls forward on this in an intentionally introspective, low-key manner. There is little acknowledgement of the audience – it is as if we were peering in on these characters, unable to connect, unable to help. This produces a critical lack of energy which makes the production drag and makes it hard to sympathise with the characters. Plus there is the very real and very basic problem of inaudibility. If you are any distance from the stage, quite a lot of the dialogue is impossible to hear.

Martin Crimp’s new version of the text brings a welcome dose of mordant wit to proceedings, and among a subtle ensemble, Geoffrey Streatfeild stands out as the amoral, destructive Freder, who works other people’s weaknesses with glee. But for all the intellectual acumen that the team brings to the production, there is something energy-sapping about trying to engage with it for two hours.

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