Theatre: SPRING AWAKENING The Pit, London

"Delinquent, defective, depraved, despicable, detestable, degenerate": this alliterative litany sounds like the kind of review that has been garnered over the years by Wedekind's Spring Awakening. Premiered in 1906, it's a play that was still capable of affronting the Lord Chamberlain in 1963 (the year sexual intercourse began), when he was only prepared to license a club performance at the Royal Court provided that the kissing scene between two boys and the words "vagina" and "penis" were removed and some alternative (croquet, perhaps?) were found for the masturbation game in the reformatory.

In fact, in the play, that list of adjectives is hurled by a schoolmaster at the coffin of a pupil (a superb Barry Farrimond) who has been driven to suicide by exam pressure, fear of letting down his parents and sexual confusion. You don't, though, have to sit through much of this drama of pubescent angst - and of the price adolescents pay for the purblind prudery of their elders - to feel that the pedagogue's unflattering report would be better applied to the majority of the adults in Spring Awakening.

Using a powerful new version by Ted Hughes, Tim Supple's production in The Pit constitutes the most stunning theatrical experience now available in London. In this staging, the masked gentleman (Mike Burnside) who is Wedekind's ambiguous deus ex machina, officiates over the proceedings throughout: a silent presence in white-face and modern suit whose sinister interventions emblematise the notion that this is a world where adults are literally the death of their children. At one point, for example, he enters the sickroom of Ellie Beavan's transfixingly authentic Wendla, the raped 14-year-old who dies of a maternally arranged abortion, with a bunch of grapes dangling from the tip of his brolly. In a creepy dissolve- effect, this suspended fruit is then transformed into the plump clusters under which the tender homosexual love scene takes place.

The play has a vividly unstable stylistic identity. There are scenes of heart-wrenching naturalism, like the one in which Wendla's repressed, terminally evasive mother (Ruth Mitchell) has to witness the cost of talking in euphemisms. Having been told that babies are produced by "love", poor Wendla can't believe she's pregnant, since (aching irony) the only person she's ever loved is her mother. These jostle, though, with scorchingly stylised moments, like the episode in the lavatory where a boy's masturbatory power-fantasy over a torn-out reproduction of an Old Master nude takes on, comically, the grandiloquent tones of Othello gazing at the sleeping Desdemona, or the final scene when the suicide returns with his head tucked under his arm to try to tempt his friend Melchior (an excellent Andrew Falvey) to a similar course.

Tom Piper's wonderfully versatile set - with its panels that slide back to reveal, say, a recessed, mirror-walled forest in which two-dimensional trees sway in the wind like hanging carcasses of meat - greatly helps the production negotiate these tricky shifts of atmosphere, as do the musical under-scorings, which range from Mahler to Richard Strauss. The teenage actors are quite astonishing and, though this play is about so much more than the dangers of sheltering the young from sex, I found myself wishing that Mrs Victoria Gillick could be forced to watch it every night of its run.

n In rep at The Pit, Barbican, London EC2. Booking: 0171-638 8891