Highveld or Low Point?

Anyone who knows ‘Woyzeck’ will know what a difficult play it can be. It was notoriously left unfinished after the death of its author Georg Buchner and attempts to finish it posthumously and translate its essence have been made many times. For my money however the results are all too often clunky, overly declarative and disengaging. Never the less, Buchner’s portfolio as a whole is often regarded as an embryonic precursor to the work of Bertol Brecht. This is high praise indeed but unfortunately, for me at least, ‘Woyzeck’ also has remained embryonic. Of what exactly? I don’t know. All I do know is that so often the resultant productions can seem as unfinished as the text itself and consequently lacking in bite.

‘So it’s a problematic script!’ I hear you cry. ‘Can we not overcome these problems with puppetry, as we can with so many of the world’s ills?’ Well dear reader, I was hopeful… but no. Puppetry as a performative art has had something of a renaissance in recent years, finding legitimization in productions such as ‘War Horse’, of which the Tony Award winning Handspring was an integral part. I thought that maybe they had chosen ‘Woyzeck’ because of its alienated characters and strangely unyielding plot. Perhaps they thought, as I did, that maybe through the prism of a delicate and intelligent use of puppetry they may be able to explore these characters from a different angle, and find something behind the uncompromising, archetypal façades. This was however not the case.

In fairness there was some excellent vocal work, and this helped to make up for the somewhat wooden (in every sense of the word) performances. The character of the Captain should be given special praise here. Woyzeck’s rasping, neurotic tormentor has never seemed more alive than he did on Tuesday night and that is not an easy feat. Unfortunately this did much more to emphasise what this production could have been, than it did to redeem its manifold shortcomings.

For such a lean and sinewy script I was amazed at how much extraneous detail was found. Certain moments, in which there was some wonderful animation work, and in which the set was used to full effect, were all too often marred by vignettes being overlong and indulgent. Anyone familiar with the alienation techniques attributed to epic theatre will be shouting at the page right now, but I promise you, I did not have chance to feel critically detached… I was too busy thinking about my shopping list.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that perhaps I was experiencing a different play to that seen by half the audience. There were, after all, two curtain calls, and I wasn’t the one doing the calling. I have a very simple diagnosis for this. Simple but important none the less. I had, from the moment Woyzeck reared his little wooden head, the feeling that I was missing something… that I was too far away. Indeed, all the literature I have seen concerning the piece is adorned with pictures of the most beautiful and intricately crafted wooden people. Could these really be the same chunks of flotsam that bobbed up and down in front of my heavily lidded eyes for two hours?

Perhaps from row A (rather than row N) all those over long, irrelevant and fiddly little bits were actually the epitome of deftness and elegance? A master class in audience engagement? Perhaps they came alive and evoked sympathy and didactic rage in a way that so many human companies have failed to do? Maybe, but is that an excuse? No. Handspring did not only win their Tony because they made people feel empathy to the inanimate; they won it more so because of the universality of their performances. They made the inanimate intimate. The Warwick Arts Centre is not bigger than the Olivier and these guys know how to use puppetry in the minefield of inconsistent vantage point and perspective that is the modern theatre. To put it bluntly, if the production cannot be toured then don’t tour it! Don’t give row A ‘War Horse’ and row N a bizarre, soviet, Sesame Street!

And there, dear reader is the rub. This is not ‘War Horse’, and it could have been. Why Handspring were such an important part of that play‘s success was because they added something that was outside the requirement of the text. They did more than could ever have been asked. Here though we have the diametric opposite. If we put aside the problems with aesthetics, and the proxemics we still have the problem of the play itself. ‘Woyzeck’ remains hard, cold, and unfinished. And, for a company that we know is able to augment and embellish a narrative with intelligence and beauty, to see them fail to engage with the fundamental problems of a text, let alone rectify them, is an enormous disappointment.