Edgy, playful, and suitably unnerving, Splendid Productions’ creative adaptation of Georg Buchner’s unfinished play blurs the conventions of theatre on a new level. From the beginning, the show leads its audience on a humorous and light-hearted path... to murder.
Three ghost-like actors, who collectively play a total of 16 roles, tell the story of peasant soldier Woyzeck, a man humiliated by his poorness and driven to the brutal stabbing of his unfaithful wife. The show is a lesson of morality, an insight into the power of jealousy and a distinctive warning that eating nothing but “the humble garden pea” for a month is a very bad idea. Yet despite its dark and disturbing plotline, the show seems intent on keeping the audience laughing – both a confusing and captivating experience. Murderously funny, this show plays out like a twisted pantomime.
On entering the auditorium at Nottingham Arts Theatre, the actors walked among the audience joking and teasing. And so the tone of the evening was set. The usual, impenetrable wall between audience and actors that is expected from most theatre productions was never established, with the house lights remaining on throughout the show.
The actors never pretended to be anything other than actors; they laughed at themselves when they went wrong and they picked up on the audience’s behaviour, making remarks a few times during the show, including: “Put your phone away madam, we are not a cinema, we are real!” This panto-esque feel to the show was something that made it both entertaining and extremely chilling. The performance even included a chorus of “Oh yes she did!” to determine that Woyzeck’s wife had been unfaithful to him, as well as a sing-a-long to a tuneful little ditty named 'Stab the Bitch Dead'.
Georg Buchner died before he had chance to complete the play and it was finished by various playwrights posthumously. Splendid Productions’ adaptation of the play chooses to showcase Buchner’s broken script by presenting the scenes in the order they were discovered, making it seem as though they are in a completely random sequence. This worked in such an effective way, however, that it is difficult to imagine this was not the way it was always intended to be seen.
An interesting element to the show was being made to sit through the murder scene three times. Each time the scene ended, tension was relieved by the actors, who made sarcastic remarks such as “didn’t see that coming did you?”, but it definitely played on your mind long after the show finished. It was hinted that the audience had the power to stop the murder happening, or was responsible for Woyzeck’s actions because they, like every other character in the play, also laughed at him and drove him to his murderous ways by humiliating him further.
The style of the play bears a strong resemblance to the plays of Bertolt Brecht, in the way that the audience do not have the illusion of being the unseen spectator. In this adaptation, Splendid Productions use this to build a relationship that really involves the audience – attributing jokes, asking their opinions, begging for them to intervene. It is being so involved while watching the play that actually makes it all the more haunting. The performance at the Arts Theatre, at points, felt more like a social experiment than a play, a comment on the nature of humanity at the viewer’s expense. And though it seemed wholly playful and laughable at the time, it is possible that Woyzeck may have caused the audience to retrospectively question their sense of humour and realise a few resounding truths about their own lives.
Woyzeck was performed at Nottingham Arts Theatre on Monday 3 November 2014.
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