DRAMA WOYZECK by Georg Buchner THE CAST Woyzeck Captain Doctor Andres Marie Kate Drum-Major 1st Showman Corporal 2nd Showman 1st Apprentice Grandmother
Stage Lights
Sandy Day Mark Burn Richard Bronk Patrick Crowley Louise Stansfield Zoe Jackson John Healey Ian Wiggle Tim Raylot Phil Lancaster Jeremy Markwick-Smith Susan Elston
THE CREW Duncan Fawthrop, Bob Marsland, Tim Prosser-Higdon Brian Macdonald, Steve Atha, Terry Wallhead Producer: Ian Lowe
About the Play:
George Buchner (1813-37) died of typhus at the age of twenty-three, leaving his fourth play 'Woyzeck' unfinished. The play is based on an actual event. In 1821 a soldier named Woyzeck killed the widow with whom he had been living. Three years later, despite the suggestion that he might he insane, he was publicly executed. Buchner crams into his play, which is only twenty-four pages long and contains as many episodic scenes, an entire vision of oppressed and suffering humanity. His Woyzeck, who is in his dumb way deeply virtuous, is oppressed by society in the persons of the Doctor and the Captain who exploit and abuse him; by the Drum-Major who seduces Marie, his woman, and then persecutes him; and above all by Marie, whose infidelity destroys his one prop in a hostile and largely incomprehensible world. `Woyzeck' has been called the first modern tragedy, because it has a working-class hero whose predicament is portrayed with insight and compassion. But its importance is much greater than that. In its poetic vision, its scale, variety and scope of theme, it anticipates by at least fifty years many of the major achievements of 'modern drama'. (adapted from `Sophocles to Fugard' by Brian Stone and Pat Scorer) About the Text:
Buchner left four separate manuscripts of the play, all of which are fragmentary and contain much overlapping material. Various scholars and producers have attempted to assemble a definitive text, with differing results, some leaving the play 'open-ended' as I have done, others suggesting that Woyzeck drowns, as in the version Berg used for his opera 30
