Old Vic, London
31st May,
2017, matinee
Some reviews – as discussed by Matt Trueman for What’s On Stage – have questioned the
faithfulness of Thorne’s adaptation. Having never seen Woyzeck before, I still came out of the theatre feeling as if I’ve
seen Woyzeck; not Woyzeck-Lite or Woyzeck in Berlin or Voidzeck
or Woy-checkplease!. It is
intriguing how Jack Thorne and Joe Murphy have emphasised that it is an
adaptation/translation of Buchner’s work and not a version after Buchner in the
way of Simon Stone’s Yerma after
Lorca. And seeing as Buchner’s work is incomplete and that even the order of
the fractured scenes is disputed (as Trueman notes) surely each new version is
quite a departure from the original text. Jamie Lloyd’s mantra of ‘treat every
new play as a classic and every classic as a new play’ comes to mind. Thorne
and Murphy, working so closely with each other during this production’s
infancy, have done both. Their Woyzeck
feels like it’s nodding to a classic play and yet feels extremely contemporary
in its themes, staging and language. In its essence, it’s a play that shows a
man’s life spiral out of control due to external forces, including mental
health difficulties, a dubious medical trial, a tumultuous upbringing, paranoia
over his girlfriend, Marie, cheating, and from the horrors (and monotony as
hinted in this production) of war.
Tom Scutt’s ingenious set uses 25 moving walls. The walls are
stark and simple, hanging from metal chains, and filled with insulation, giving
them a makeshift quality. They move up and down from the flies and side to side
from the wings to create a number of places such as the claustrophobic bedroom
of Woyzeck and Marie, long dark corridors and chasm-like spaces. They’re like
machinery, imposing as they close in like shutters. They take up 90% of the
space when fully used and dominate the design, the rest comprising of only a
bed, a cot and the odd chair. The walls aren’t to be trusted though: characters
are revealed behind them when they move, and in the second act bits of the
lagging paper are ripped to reveal bloody guts spilling out from inside.
They’re a reminder of the abattoir that sits beneath the flat and act as a
reminder of violence that soldiers perhaps come across and a foreshadowing of
the violence to come.
The little I knew of the play beforehand was its interesting
use of space. This production doesn’t mimetically take us from the fairground
to bars to fields to apartments in such a loaded way as I imagined but Scutt’s
design still gives a splintered sense of space which reflects the fractured
structure of the play and Woyzeck’s sense of placelessness: as Steve Waters has
previously pointed out in The Secret Life
of Plays, Woyzeck ‘belongs nowhere and owns nothing’. And because the stage
is often so bare and cold (noticeably different from the Old Vic’s red plush
curtain), military, medical and supposedly domestic settings feel effectively
loaded with a sense of something sterile, temporary and alienated. It’s
something I can’t quite put my finger on but it did feel that we, like Woyzeck,
were stuck in a stasis, on a border, between freedom and entrapment, madness
and sanity, etc.
We hurtle through the play’s structure, towards the
inevitably tragic end, seeing the external forces that drive Woyzeck to doubt
his wife’s faithfulness and the gender of his baby, and then, ultimately, to
violence. He turns on his friends, his family and himself, and it is
increasingly uncomfortable to watch – from the animalistic and rough sex scenes
which infiltrate Woyzeck’s consciousness, to the limpness of Marie’s lifeless
body, dangled like a ragdoll from his arms. The rapidity with which the play
moves is momentous, car-crash theatre. But despite the horror, you can’t look
away. I’m reminded briefly of play’s which have similar (or perhaps dissimilar)
structures like Mamet’s Edmond and
Stephens’ Birdland. I’m intrigued to
learn more about the play and different versions of it.
Thorne’s version has apparently made more of the part of
Marie and commendably so. In Sarah Greene’s portrayal, she is loving, resilient
and someone who has given up everything for Woyzeck. Ben Batt as Woyzeck’s
colleague Andrews (a composite character?) is aggressive and selfish but also
elicits sympathy in an odd sort of way, perhaps as he’s Woyzeck’s only friend. The
marquee outside the Old Vic describes the production as ‘John Boyega in Woyzeck’, and the intention to diversify
the audience and create a more accessible version of the play is palpable in
Boyega’s presence. Having (shock horror!) never seen Star Wars, and only knowing Boyega previously from his affable
chat-show personality, he proves himself worthy of the acclaim he’s achieved of
late. Physically imposing, he broods and stalks the stage, his actions
inconceivable, but his psyche pitiful as he transforms into a raving shell of a
man.
Woyzeck runs at the Old Vic until 24th
June.
Stefan Rhodri as the Captain and John Boyega as Woyzeck in Woyzeck at the Old Vic. Photo by Manuel Harlan |
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