“Woyzeck” at Old Vic Theatre
Vera Lieber on the South Bank
24 May 2017
Influenced by Shakespeare. Goethe, and the Sturm und Drang movement, Georg Büchner, who died aged only twenty-three in 1837, wrote of a mad, dark world full of social iniquities and injustice. His humankind are class-ridden dog-eat-dog beings capable only of malice, greed, betrayal – no milk of human kindness and no morality; only the rich can afford to be virtuous. Life Is cheap at the bottom of the heap. Büchner, based his drama Woyzeck on an actual murder, a crime of passion, but it is his revulsion towards social conditions that has kept this young man’s precocious work alive and contemporary.
It’s a radical parable, a pessimistic social critique found amongst his papers after his tragically early death: incomplete, unpolished, but written with the passion and political commitment of a young student (of natural sciences and medicine). It is not surprising that it speaks for all time as well as for what has changed but it is even more surprising when a play written in the early nineteenth century seems more modern and avant-garde than this production’s updated twenty-first century adaptation from BAFTA-laden writer Jack Thorne (This Is England, Let the Right One In, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) which mistakenly replaces the grotesque with coarseness.
A powerful poetic and expressionistic psychodrama. Woyzeck’s 24 fragmentary scenes lend themselves to innumerable interpretations: operatic, musical, circus spectacle and cinematic. There’s always been a freedom to shuffle the scenes to make one’s own statement. Thorne has chosen a wordy naturalistic approach, an explication de texte that hammers the message home yet underwhelms with too much talk.
Addressing army issues of post-traumatic stress disorder, remembering the dead end-boys from his state school who joined the army at 16, Thorne sets the scene in 1980s Berlin with the British Army guarding the wall between East and West, a boring posting after the dangers of Belfast. Squaddie Frank Woyzeck (John Boyega) has been given a backstory too. A soldier who went AWOL in Belfast, an abused child fostered out by a mother who made him watch her with her clients, he is a simple soul – illiterate, prone to bad dreams in which he sees himself as that child with a crowbar in his hands.
Walls descend. They are concrete grey panels, 15 from the flies and eight from the wings, class barriers, asylum cells, the labyrinth of the mind. When Woyzeck beats his head against them, blood-red guts spill out. Life is a slaughterhouse. Thome has him and his sensible common law-wife Irish Catholic Marie (Sarah Greene, excellent) living above a halal abattoir with their baby. No money, not married, no room for them in army barracks but their place is convenient for his randy friend Andrews to bring Captain Thompson’s posh and snooty Oxford-educated wife Maggie for loud and vigorous hardcore casual sex (“her pussy smells of money!”)
Little is left to the imagination – bollocks-bare Andrews is proudly uninhibited, like the circus monkey he imitates in vulgar show. Thorne and director Joe Murphy lay on crudity in spades for the sake of cheap laughs, titters, and groans: the baby’s Care Bear is a bespattered victim of this wild coupling. Women are whores and men no better. Maggie, a deliciously imperious Nancy Carroll (doubling as Woyzeck’s slag of a mother) condescends to Marie whilst consorting with rough trade. Andrews (Ben Batt, dynamic) at least knows what he is and he’s out to get as much skirt as he can. He tries it on with Marie with his box of OMO washing powder – since you ask placed in the window it is a silly sign for available sex: “On My Own”.
A worthy prosaic production is straining for titillating comedy to lighten the signposted tragedy. Woyzeck suspects Marie might be up for it with Andrews. Jealousy takes over and the inevitable happens. He confuses her with Maggie and his mother In his dreams, strangles his love, and then blows his brains out. No epic pity, this is no Othello: no horror, just another depressed young man with PTSD biting the dust – does society care? It’s a role difficult to act convincingly, and Boyega turns in a low-key performance, a blank canvas – though his Star Wars fans in the audience cheer him on and there are queues at the stage door. It’s a new crowd for the Old Vic …
More than jealousy has driven Squaddie Woyzeck to this pitch: the hypocrisy of the world, the upper echelon’s patronizing disdain for those lower down the food chain. To make some money Woyzeck takes part in medical hormone tests, green pills that unbalance his already confused brain. Is white-haired Doctor Martens (Darrell D’Silva) meant to be a throwback to the Nazi era? The Captain (Steffan Rhodri) whom Woyzeck regularly shaves and gives intimate massages to, turns into a nineteenth-century British colonial officer in red uniform and white pith helmet – is he meant to remind us of Michael Caine in the 1964 film Zulu? Is Thorne taking the pith?
Büchner’s archetypes are turned into caricatures, but where are the Drum Major, the Showman, the Professor, the Jew, the Idiot? Where is the poetry, where the magical realism, where can we find Büchner’s appeal to something beyond our intellect – to empathy? Where Is the space for audience input? Tom Scutt’s conceptual design under Neil Austin’s murky lighting is bleak and minimal; Isobel Waller-Bridge’s music a cinematic score with pace and tension uneven. I’m afraid I fail to rise to the occasion. As a portrait of a deranged man in an indifferent world. Woyzeck feels an exercise less in stimulating symbolism than in ideological literalness. My heart and mind are not moved.
