Classic packs emotional punch

10 April 2012

Buchner may have been the first playwright to celebrate a working-class hero, but his position on goldfish is unknown — perhaps fortunately, since here a drunk seizes a goldfish bowl and glugs greedily as the frantic fish swims in the opposite direction.

Yet, the rights of fish aside, Woyzeck is an inspired choice of script for Cardboard Citizens, the only homeless and ex-homeless people’s professional theatre company, since its themes of profound alienation and social rejection inevitably carry an emotional punch that resonates far beyond the theatre.

This production comes hard on the worn-down heels of Pericles — Cardboard Citizens’ collaboration with the RSC this summer — and employs more successfully a classical text to highlight the problems that can drive people onto the streets.

In Adrian Jackson’s raw and lively production, the audience is greeted by a seemingly haphazard set of ageing armchairs, rats’ cages, goldfish bowls and wooden seats — a jovial junk-shop which only on second glance reveals a symmetry hinting at both the repetitiveness and the tedium of Woyzeck’s frustrated life.

Woyzeck has been described as the lower-class King Lear — yet clearly money is the hostile elemental force here, in a Brechtian presentation which shows “Frankie Woyzeck” eating a dejected diet of tinned peas for government experiments, and experiencing both sexual and financial inadequacy as the mother of his child, Marie, shows off glittering earrings from her soldier lover.

In the second part of the evening, which I saw on a preview, Jackson added another layer of interpretation by encouraging the audience to suggest and act out alternatives for a man whose alienation manifests itself as mental illness — a refreshingly unliterary approach to one of literature and opera’s most complex fragmented texts.

Bold and gutsy, this vibrantly acted piece truly brings Buchner to the people. Goldfish aside, he would surely have approved.

Woyzeck

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