Photos – Jamie WilliamsA diet of of peas will stop you from peeing and necessitates the constant checking of your pulse.
This cross pollination of pun and vocab acrobatics from a white coated mad clinician advising the titular character is as about as light as it gets in Jette Steckel's production of Woyzeck, the celebrated tragedy of modern German theatre repertoire.
Staged on an immense cargo net which winches from the vertical to the horizontal often times perilously and precariously perpendicular, this version of George Buchner's unfinished magnum opus for the German company, Thalia Theatre, is based on the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson collaboration from over a decade ago.
Steckel has reinstated more scenes from the original text. This creates more surtitling and on opening night the surtitles were frustratingly out of synch, so this piece of theatre was more akin to watching a badly dubbed Japanese television series.
Not to worry, the poor soldier has the proletarian lovesick blues to fall back on, however, for the most part, the Waits was hardly worth the wait.
Heavily miked, the performers screech and shout the lyrics, and so the space to hear Tom's words and Kathleen Brennan's music are squeezed. Better to stay home and crank up Blood Money.
The image of the net, although not a safety device, conjures the idea of circus and Waits' music carries cabaret burlesque and carny surrealism in it's Coney Island crank and monkey organ grind. But its delivery seems undisciplined, a carelessness that matches the midnight mood of morbid meaninglessness.
The score may be made up of gritty dirges like Misery is the River of the World and Everything Goes To Hell, but those songs, dour and heartbreaking, nevertheless connect powerfully in a way that this show fails to visually.
Cohesion and clarity seem to have slipped through the net of Woyzeck, perhaps a matter of lost in translation.
Thalia Theater Hamburg presents
Woyzeck
Adapted from Georg Büchner | created by Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Robert Wilson
Director Jette Steckel
Venue: Carriageworks Bay 17
Dates: 7 – 12 January 2016 (No performance on Sunday)
Tickets: $89 – $71
Bookings: 1300 856 876 | sydneyfestival.org.au/woyzeck
Part of the 2016 Sydney Festival
