A Woyzeck is not for the faint of heart – at least if you take it seriously. The German stage in Hungary shows Georg Büchner’s drama fragment brutally and completely unembellished.
A really successful direction and a remarkable acting performance convinced on March 23rd in the Budapest National Theater.
“It’s obscene, downright tasteless,” a gentleman with long white hair – his chic red scarf completes the educated middle-class – said quite loudly in the hall after almost half an hour. Yes: The Woyzeck shocked. And so should he. To stage it takes courage to want to shock.
degradation by society
The Serbian director Nemanja Petronje has this courage. He places the degradation of Woyzeck by society at the center of his production. Woyzeck, played by Otto Beckmann, is ill, hears voices and has delusions. He suffers from severe schizophrenia. The captain, whom he has to serve, not only pseudo-intellectually condescending by Dávid Földszin, but also shown to be quite vulnerable, Petronje confronts a doctor (Niklas Schüler), who possibly overcompensates for the harassment that the captain missed out on a bit.
Held on a dog leash, Andres (Dezső Horgász), Woyzeck’s friend and roommate, is beaten up by him, causing him to spit blood while he talks about urinating on a house wall. He sees the main problem here less in the immoral public “pissing” but rather in the fact that he would have had to make the urine available to “science”. The recipe for the success of this work is that Nemanja Petronje analogously depicts the intensity of the psychological violence, which is difficult to depict, on a physical level.
Deliberate inconsistencies
Some connoisseurs of the work may have been surprised that not Woyzeck, but – unlike in Büchner’s original – Andres found himself on the dog leash. And why does Marie’s neighbor Margret keep whispering the characteristic songs (“Hasenlied”, “Lustige Jägerei”, etc.) into a microphone in a pain-distorted, phobic, disturbing manner?
There are small inconsistencies that increase in increasing insanity. For example, Marie is now apparently cheating on Andres as well. This drift from reality – Büchner’s reality – is the driving force behind Petronje’s interpretation. It underscores Woyzeck’s pathological development and society’s guilt, which might otherwise remain hidden. Thus exaggeration brings out the core of the work.
Constant contradiction between two worlds
In any case, there is a constant contradiction between two worlds: the real, terrible world that humiliates Woyzeck and his schizophrenic madness. The Serbian director succeeds in oscillating between delusion and reality as a development towards murder through surreal contrasts in directing the characters (the otherwise perfidious, serious doctor suddenly looks like an inebriated cliché Nazi on social welfare). In addition, this contrast is underlined by two spotlights in the center of the stage directed into the auditorium – lights on: reality, lights off: madness. Something very tried and bold, but it serves its purpose.
Overall, the acting is very good. Although Eszter Sipos remains rather pale as Marie, the drum major, impressively played by Dominik Spies, convinces across the board. A drum major is not a military man, but the leader of a brass band and thus – for Büchner – a jumping jack. Exaggerated as a kind of clown, Spies depicts a grotesque drum major – not funny, but rather as a horror clown in military uniform.
Evil lurks behind the nice face. Büchner was a revolutionary – a “revolutionary of the purest water”, as Alfred Döblin once called him. The Woyzeck is cunning to the last iota of revolution. Kurt Tucholsky aptly remarked that Büchner’s theater was made for “the dear people to whom you have to explain a little bit how life is.” In this respect, the reaction of the wealthy gentleman with the red scarf may have the class of this work, but also emphasized the performance.
The author works at the German-Hungarian Institute for European Cooperation at the MCC.