Woyzeck
Barbican, London

Andrew Haydon
posted 10 July 2006

There is a tradition in European theatre which, simply put, dictates: if you just put the play as it is written on the stage, you are not fit to call yourself a director. This is almost the exact opposite of the prevailing stricture in British theatre, which states: the director is there to serve the author. In England, slavish devotion to the text as it is written is still very much de rigueur. The Icelandic Vesturport Theatre's Woyzeck is very much of the former tradition, and none the worse for it.

The action takes place on an astroturfed promontory set before a tangle of aluminium pipes, suggestive of some vast, sinister industrial complex, the timescale of the play condensed into a single evening's bacchanal. Georg Büchner's story is an unfinished collection of odd scenes, plotting the life of the titular anti-hero from a life of oafish toil to the jealous murder of his unfaithful partner Marie (here dressed unaccountably in the costume of Walt Disney's Snow White). At this simple narrative, director Gísli Örn Gardarsson chucks several bucketloads of theatrical innovation, madcap surrealism and baffling sideshows. Featuring heavily are several episodes of aerial acrobatics, with characters descending from the Gods, being trussed up and flown across the auditorium or flung from high ramparts to swing chaotically across the front rows of the audience. Actors drop unexpectedly into manholes in the stage, flowers rain like arrows to stick, quivering, into the ground around a romantic scene, and a large moat-like series of fishtanks is revealed into which actors duly leap to swim, copulate and eventually drown. This cartoonish, carnival-like atmosphere is leant an extra dimension by an original score from Warren Ellis and goth rock hero Nick Cave which swings between his most mordant, bombastic deep-south self and softer, melancholic balladeering.

Does all this innovation work? Yes and no. The net effect of the novelties on offer is at once pleasurable and distracting. The actual business of the plot is several times left far behind and frequently there is more cause for concern over the safety of the actors as they perform another hair-raising feat than for the emotional journey of their putative characters. The bare bones of the story continually reassert themselves, and the tragic conclusion is rendered no less pitiable for all the gallivanting which has preceded it. What is lost is any sense of the social context for the story, but it is no weaker for that. Despite having been written in 1835-6, Woyzeck remains a strikingly modern piece of work - one need only look to the parallels drawn between it and the Royal Court's recent hit Motortown to see the long shadow it still casts over dramatic stories which concern themselves with the brutal oppression of the ignorant, violent working man. It is refreshing here to see such archetypes given a new life with such exuberant staging.

Till 15 July 2006.