Woyzeck

Woyzeck
Created by Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Robert Wilson. Thalia Theatre, Hamburg. Sydney Festival. Carriageworks. January 7 – 12, 2016.

The Sydney Festival has opened its 40th year - and the last by its Flemish artistic director Lieven Bertels - with an appropriately, surreal, circus-sized music theatre telling of a great German classic.

Based on the landmark early social drama by the young Georg Buchner in 1836, Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre has re-conceived the acclaimed version created by director Robert Wilson and composers Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan in 2000. 

Poor Woyzeck and the other victims and bullies in this cruelly indifferent world hang, climb and fall through an enormous net. Jette Sterkel’s eight actors populate this giddy, shadowed space with an impressive physicality, as the shifting net captures the madness to which Woycek descends.  His murder of his faithless wife, slipping through the strings,   is electric. 

The text (with English surtitles) is poetic but sharply succinct, alternating the philosophical and vernacular.  Felix Knopp’s everyman Woyceck is beaten but still proud, and his singing concert-perfect (even hanging upside down).  With Franziska Hartmann as the  desperately sexual wife, Marie, it’s an inventive ensemble of highly individual, agile actor/singers.

The stars though are the Waits/Brennan songs.  They reach from discordant jazz to deep blues, through rollicking tavern songs, ballads and Broadway slick melodies, with a nod to Kurt Weill. And their dark, droll lyrics match the text. Songs such as Misery is the River of the World and God’s Away on Business beautifully capture the work’s mood and social  themes.  

True, as with the music, this production focuses on a world rather than its relationships and characters.  These, and our engagement with the narrative, are sometimes entrapped  in the netting or otherwise lost in the minimally lit set, to say nothing of the growing Expressionist madness of this Woyzeck.  Or the sometimes clumsy surtitling. But this first visit to Australia by Thalia is, ultimately, an impressive festival opener.

Martin Portus 

Photographer: Jamie Williams.

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