Woyzeck

Rating:
Summary: Fast-Paced and Gripping
Review: (I always wanted to say that.)

Woyzeck is a designer's nightmare but an actor's dream: a tragedy of immediate imagery, almost written for the MTV generation. Scenes that last at most two pages flicker around archetypes like the overbearing Major and the menacing Doctor, while the play's more human characters find themselves caught in between. There are searingly tragic moments (as befits the genre). There are also darkly funny ones: Woyzeck's conspiracy theories, Andres's childish songs, the Scholar's politically incorrect comments.

Buchner left the world young, and if this play is any indication, that's a tragedy too. As a reader, an actor or a (shudder) designer, you'll enjoy being swept along by his work.

Rating:
Summary: Blame the translator, not the author
Review: Having been involved in a production of a play, I was very surprised to read this edition, surprised because it seemed to lose so much of the play's poetry and excitement. By altering the text to create a rather traditional form of theater, Mr. Rudall undermines the power of the text fragments and fails to adequately provide future performers and readers with the materials to create a production. I would advise anyone interested in the play, which is at turns tragic, hysterical, and terrifying, to seek another translation.

Rating:
Summary: It's an IB life for us
Review: Well, this play sure was unique, I'll give it that. I had to read it for the Theatre Arts International Baccalaureate Exam (2001). It was one of three choices (the other two were by Dario Fo and Lorraine Hansberry which explains their listing on the "people who bought this also bought" list) and it seemed the most interesting. Basically, Woyzeck is a soldier in 1830s Germany. He has a girlfriend whom he discovers is cheating on him with a higher-ranking official. All the while, he is humiliated by his superiors and the townspeople. One day, he buys a knife and murders his girlfriend. The author, Georg Buechner, died while writing the play, so it ends, rather ambiguously, with Woyzeck wading into a pond into which he will throw the murder weapon. This was an interesting play to analyze for IB inasmuch as it provided a good deal of material for me to work with and I had good ideas about how the play ought to be produced. Still, the plot was very strange.