I
have very few details for Ron Perlman's version of this production
apart from the fact that it was directed by Chris Martin, and Ron
played the title role of Woyzeck.
However, I am including extracts from some reviews of a later
production, which will give an insight into the subject matter
of the play. This version of Woyzeck was performed in 1997,
and directed by Marcus Stern.
From Past Productions
"Woyzeck" by Georg
Büchner
The play we know today as Woyzeck began as a drawerful
of fragments left by a brilliant 22-year-old playwright who died of
typhus in 1836. A handful of hallucinatory scenes sketch the tale
of a man, conditionally programmed by medical science, who commits
a terrible crime. The real-life source had been the O.J. Simpson case
of the 1820s: a sensational jealousy-murder that sparked debate about
the treatment of the insane. Büchner's unfinished script lay dormant
until it was published in 1879 and finally produced in 1913 (Alban
Berg composed the well-known operatic version --Wozzeck --
in 1925). Today Woyzeck is recognized as a modernist classic,
posing an intriguing challenge for every director who approaches it.
Each production must interpret and arrange the pieces according to
its own vision.
Synopsis
Franz Woyzeck is an impoverished soldier in a small town. Bullied
by his Captain and subjected to bizarre medical experimentation by
an army doctor, Woyzeck's nerves are already strained when he begins
to suspect that his common-law wife, Marie, is having an affair with
a Drum-Major. Through a series of vignettes, the play charts his increasing
distrust and anger until, overcome with jealousy and despair, Woyzeck
is driven to destroy the only thing he has ever loved.
The full review can be found at: http://www.amrep.org/past/woyzeck/woyzeck.html
**************
"Woyzeck the Shape-Changer"
Excerpts from an article by Robert Scanlan, Literary Director of
the American Repertory Theatre
Woyzeck is a play so charged with novelty that it has
provoked innumerable interpretations, and it still shows no sign of
settling down into any fixed meaning. Because its central character
is the first proletarian protagonist treated tragically in western
drama, Woyzeck has been hailed by theatre historians as the
first truly modern play. It is certainly among the first works in
the Western tradition to break with Aristotle's rough (and ancient)
formulation of the types of subjects that differentiate comedy from
tragedy.
Woyzeck clearly took up a character the tradition would
have depicted comically -- an inarticulate menial servant -- but built
a circumstantial case of enormous potential sympathy for his oppressed
condition in society. This powerful circumstantial case has struck
many of Woyzeck's admirers as the revolutionary purpose of
the play.
Yet another view of Woyzeck that has sprung up since Berg's
opera is the psycho-medical reading of the play. Modern doctors and
psychiatrists have found the portrayal of the character of Woyzeck
so objectively clinical that the case for an impassioned revolutionary
intent on Büchner's part has given way to a more strictly medical
reading of the play. Indeed, Büchner is now thought to have given
in the scenes of Woyzeck (as well as in his novella Lenz
) one of the earliest clinically accurate descriptions of acute paranoid
schizophrenia to be found in European literature.
By the mid twentieth century, Woyzeck was appreciated
for its stark portrayal of an existentialist despair soon to be echoed
and paralleled by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Scenes
such as that depicting Woyzeck and his hapless companion Andres
out cutting sticks in an open meadow suddenly seemed to anticipate
the bleak atheistic suspension of post-holocaust European man in an
incomprehensible (because meaningless) deterministic chaos. Woyzeck
had, long before the advent of the "theatre of the absurd," claimed
new aesthetic scope for purely theatrical depictions of nameless states
of consciousness, anxiety, and dread on the stage.
No one in 1997 America will need to be reminded how topical a
play about sexual betrayal, domestic violence, and manic outbursts
of homicidal rage is to these closing years of the millennium. Woyzeck
has never been out of fashion, aesthetically speaking, and each new
generation has found it an inexhaustible speculum mundi, or mirror
of the world we live in. There is a curious irony in calling Woyzeck
a perennially avant-garde play, for the term is an obvious oxymoron,
but this single short play has fed generation after generation of
avant-garde, cutting edge, and next wave movements in the theatre,
and it shows no sign of failing to elicit the enfant terrible in every
artist who undertakes to stage the play.
The full review can be found at: http://www.amrep.org/past/woyzeck/woyzeck3.html