‘Woyzeck’

Sheila O’Donnell

Some notes on ‘Woyzeck’, by Georg Buchner performed by the Betty Nansen Theatre of Denmark; directed, designed and lit by Robert Wilson, with songs and music by Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits.

It is difficult to categorise this theatrical work; it is a play but it combines aspects of opera, pantomine, carnival and circus.

The storey is told in twelve scenes, each one discrete and, to an extent, self-contained. There is no clear narrative/ linear thread. It seemed that they could have been played in a different order without damaging the integrity or meaning. The manuscript for Georg Buchner’s play ‘Woyzeck’, unfinished at the time of his death in 1837, was lost for forty years. When found, it was damaged and faded, and the pages, with no numbers, were out of order. So each time it is staged it involves a kind of selection from the available parts of the manuscript. This came across clearly in the sense of juxtaposition, overlay and repetition in this production, where it is clear that Robert Wilson has constructed his own form out of the parts. What I offer here is a series of impressions and thoughts on Wilson’s work, in no particular order because that is how it struck me.

The work is a remarkable collaboration between Wilson and Waits; a synthesis of movement, space, music and light achieved at the highest level. It is a chilling and alarming depiction of a downward spiral into despair and madness; sound and vision combined to create an atmosphere of menace.

The spoken words were in Danish, a language incomprehensible to most of the audience, but this did not create a barrier to understanding. Indeed, it accentuated the fact that the meaning and cruelty of the piece was conveyed through design, not dialogue. There was no feeling of missing the point; in fact you could not escape the point. It hit you through light and shadow, controlled movement, extreme sounds (including music, noise and silence) visual symbols, costumes and figures. Even if you closed your eyes you could not escape from the fear, it came in through in your ears.

Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits are responsible for the music and songs, though these two words provide an inadequate description of the ‘soundtrack’. At times it felt that the stage space was being designed around the songs, and at others that the noise and music were a terrifying accompaniment to Wilson’s vision. It is unusual to find a play where sound (other than words) plays such an important and integral role in the development of the drama. The songs, sung in English, acted like captions to each scene, providing a kind of running commentary rather than narrative detail. "If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man". They have a wonderful black humour, typical of Waits’ work. This lightened things somewhat, allowing the characters to hold their serious intensity and letting us understand their predicament while simultaneously laughing at their foolishness. They were mostly sung by the cast, who managed to produce that special downbeat Tom Waits sound, without mimicking his gravelly voice. "The more he shows his tail the higher a monkey can climb."

The soldier Woyzeck lives in a barracks with his wife and child. It is an everyday story of betrayal, love lost, cruelty, despair and murder. The characterisation is built up through costumes, choreography, symbolic elements and sound. Woyzeck is dressed in a crisp pure white outfit – something between a strait-jacket and a military uniform. He moves in a dreamy, slow, deliberate way, inter-cut with moments of frenzy. Most memorably, he runs towards us in slow motion staring wildly ahead, white against black, never getting anywhere, accompanied by a frantic panting music; this image recurs, becoming a kind of symbol of Woyzeck’s lack of control over his life. When he runs his chest is bare, which makes him appear vunerable. He is in the deep space of the empty stage against a screen of light, extending our sense of the scale of the stage by appearing to stay in the one place while moving. There is also a sense here of time stretched.

The actors often appear as mannequins or puppets. Their wonderful costumes and choreography dehumanise them, or exaggerate their less attractive human traits.

Woyzeck’s wife, Marie, is spiky and hard; with her angular, sharp, red dress, her shiny black helmet of hair and her stiff, mechanical movements, she has a cold heart. However, her puppet-like movements leave room for the feeling that she also is being manipulated, and is not in full control of her actions. The Siamese twin doctors, beetle-like in shiny blue-black bustles and hair, are evil and menacing, striking fear wherever they appear.

It is through Marie’s son that we get a sense of access to the action. The young boy with his little chest exposed, lower body wrapped in soft white cloth wanders un-choreographed through the action. He moves naturally between the shiny, hard, wind-up adults, succeeding only partly in reminding us of the vunerability and innocence of humans or of the flawed humanity of the other characters. It is remarkable that on the fairly large stage of the Gaiety, within a highly designed and mechanised set, our attention was repeatedly drawn to a piece of red string that the boy pulled from his mother Marie’s carapace-like red dress, and which he kept with him throughout the rest of the play. It was like the last thread of connection with her softness. Once he chewed it, later he wound it lightly around his finger until it was finally snatched from him after Marie’s death by a sinister older woman, also dressed in red bustle who tells him, in song, that he is a child all alone.

The capacity to highlight small elements on stage was one of the most impressive aspects of the piece. Lighting was used with devastating accuracy. In a domestic scene, Woyzeck’s hand laid on Marie’s shoulder is suddenly red, everything else drops to darkness, predicting her bloody end. When Woyzeck, his white suit now covered by a long black coat, moves in to kill Marie, a black circle slowly descends against the white backround eclipsing the light – the white triangle of the murderer’s blade cut out of the blackness is suffused with red light as Marie dies.

These moments have something of the power of the cinematic close-up, something I have never seen on the theatre stage before. And Wilson succeeds in bringing a number of cinematic devices into his work: the use of slow motion, the jump shot, scale shifts between foreground and backround and Tom Waits songs; a reinterpretation of the sub-titles of silent movies.

By using the most sophisticated contemporary technology, he brings the ideas, atmosphere and distorted spatial quality of early cinema back on to the stage. It was a pleasure to see computer technology used so carefully to achieve a really precise visual concept; with no showing off, no holograms or virtual reality. The technology was clearly in the service of the idea, and was absorbed into the art form. I felt a great empathy for the aesthetic of old-fashioned modernism which was so freshly evoked and still had the power to thrill and shock. The use of light and shadow, layers, gauze, projection, mechanical looking devices recalled Leger’s ‘Ballet Mechanique’ and particularly ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, with its skewed perspectives, strong shadows and sinister doctor. There were also references to Oskar Schlemmer, Constructivism and the black humour and throwaway cruelty of the songs was reminiscent of the film ‘Cabaret’.

It is possible that the whole thing was over-stylised, that the stream of recognisable visual references, while very enjoyable, interfered with the potential to enter fully into the macabre world unfolding before us. There was a repeated cutting-in of everyday reality like a slide show between me and the action showing Brecht, Grosz, ’Cabaret’, etc. This provided a kind of protective screen, like the gauze screens in the set, which distanced.

‘Woyzeck’ is one of two productions in the 2001 Dublin Theatre Festival which deeply impressed me. Tom Murphy’s ‘Bailegangaire’ at the Peacock could almost be described as its opposite. There is only one setting: a mad old woman, Mommo, sits up in bed in her nightgown commanding the space of the stage and the auditorium with words. The wonderful poetry of the language she uses conjures up a world full of tragedy and pathos, overlaid with black humour. This play is also about a broken narrative; Mommo repeatedly tells a long and convoluted story avoiding its conclusion. Her granddaughter struggles to make her put the parts together in the right order to achieve some sense of resolution. Somehow this apparently naturalistic, ordinary situation, heightened by a kind of surrealism, brings the audience right into the space of the play and makes us acutely aware of the physical presence of Mommo and her granddaughters. The rhythm and intense emotion of the writing make it impossible for us to stay distant. On the other hand, ‘Woyzeck’ is a spectacle. The visually thrilling layers of screens and gauze, light, colour and silhouetted form hold us at a distance. We’re always outside, looking into the space of the action. It certainly has the power to create an emotional response, but perhaps it doesn’t give you time or space to think about its meaning.

Sheila O’Donnell is an architect and partner in O’Donnell+Tuomey Architects.