Download Theatre: Lost in Translation Woyzeck on the Highveld

Woyzeck on the Highveld – review (Barbican, London)
Lyn Gardner, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 September 2011
Woyzeck on the Highveld. Photograph: Alastair Muir for the Guardian
Georg Büchner's soldier returns, but not quite as we know him, in the Handspring Puppet
Company's version, which transposes the 19th-century drama of alienation and savage poetry
to 1956 Johannesburg. The soldier, Woyzeck, becomes a black migrant worker; he submits
himself to the indignities of being a guinea pig for the Doctor, at the beck and call of a local
bigwig, and is eaten up with jealousy when his wife betrays him with a miner.
Famously, Handspring created the extraordinary puppets for the National Theatre hit
Warhorse. This production, one of the company's early successes, dates from 1992 – and
sometimes it shows. The mix of puppetry, live performance and film is no longer as startling
as it would have been almost 20 years ago, and there is a muddiness to the storytelling that
could be alienating for someone unfamiliar with the original.
Nonetheless, Woyzeck the puppet, whose mouth never opens and whose strings are pulled by
others, is a perfect fit of form and content; what the piece lacks in clarity, it makes up for in
dark, brooding atmosphere. It is as if Woyzeck's looming mental disintegration is part of the
landscape: William Kentridge's unnerving black-and-white animations offer all the bleakness
of a land scarred by mining, summoning up the impoverished township and the desolation of
the dance hall.
The sky itself seems to bear down on Woyzeck, a high-cheeked figure who turns his face to
the stars but cannot escape the oppressive stink of life. "You are beautiful as sin," he says of
his wife. There are times when this production is as beautiful as sin, too, reminding us that,
like Woyzeck, we go on, and on, and on. And then we stop.
© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Theatre: Lost in Translation � Woyzeck on the Highveld
Posted on Thursday, April 17 @ 14:33:48 EST by Catriona Menzies-Pike
Reviewed by Darren Brookes
Based on the unfinished nineteenth century German play by George Buchner,
Woyzeck, Woyzeck on the Highveld combines art, multimedia, music, song and
puppetry to create a distinctly South African version of the play. Often crosscultural renditions of famous works produce stunning hybrids. Akira Kurasawa’s
Throne of Blood is an evocative retelling of Macbeth with all of the major themes
intact plus the addition of a stylized Japanese aesthetic, leaving no need to have
seen the original. Handspring Puppet Theatre’s Woyzeck on the Highveld attempts to retell Buchner’s
dark story yet misses the mark, leaving the audience with a somewhat inaccessible and cryptic piece
in its staging and execution.
This production simply does not engage from its outset. The original play introduces all of the main
themes in the first four acts. Poverty, suffering, the biblical, madness, animal nature and sexuality are
all developed in the two central characters early on. The play’s power lies in the contrast between the
two fully realized human characters of the military barber Woyzeck and his common-law wife Marie
and the less sympathetic characters of the Doctor, Drum-Major (Miner), Sergeant (Captain),
Showman (Barker) et al., who act as two dimensional foils. It is the uncaring inhumanity of the other
characters that bring about Woyzeck’s descent into madness and ultimate act of violence towards
Marie. Handspring’s production, under the direction of William Kentridge, manages to make all
characters seem two dimensional and the narrative somewhat incoherent.
This does not seem to be the fault of the puppeteers, actors, singers, designers or even Kentridge’s
own evocative multimedia backdrop as there is certainly an abundance of talent on display. It is
simply misdirected in this production. The additional gaps in the narrative and overall vagueness of
theme articulation do not help. A first-time viewer would not realize, for example, that Woyzeck, due to
his impoverished circumstances, is a human guinea pig on a strict diet of peas, which is causing a
slow mental breakdown. The Doctor’s clinical observation of Woyzeck’s deterioration represents
man’s inhumanity to man and yet this is staged in a random, almost absurdist way. Similarly
Woyzeck’s intended Christ-like persona does not emerge. The character seems to be sleepwalking
through the performance and the motivations for his act of violence are not made clear, making the
murder scene appear banal. The resulting pastiche references themes of the original play in an adhoc manner without fully communicating them to the audience.
The Brechtian Showman (or ‘Barker’ in this production), played by Mncedisi Shabangu, the only nonpuppet actor, is out of place. His scenes are set apart from the main play, unlike in the original, where
Woyzeck and Marie attend a circus. The perfect man, represented by a horse in the original play is
replaced by a puppet rhino in this production. The rhino’s tricks and projected thoughts are static and
removed from the main action. Again knowledge of the original is required to understand what is
going on. Where is the dancing monkey that represents Woyzeck? The direction here does not seem
to obey the conventions of theatre. The fourth wall is removed in the showman scenes, yet the
audience does not understand the place of these scenes in the narrative unless they have seen the
original.
The puppetry, the main attraction of the production is reminiscent of Japanese Bunraku. Yet unlike
the Japanese form, the human operators are unmasked and intertwined in the puppets’ movements,
losing the finesse and floating ghost-like quality of Bunraku. The effect is unsatisfying and at times it is
hard to justify the use of the puppets at all. Human actors would have been more effective in the story
telling of some of the scenes. The most engaging use of the puppets is that of Marie and Woyzeck’s
illegitimate child flying to the moon, yet this seems to belong to a different story. Likewise, the shadow
puppets of figures walking along the veld, while comic and whimsical, seem dislocated.
The multimedia art work is well executed as it displays the internal worlds and thoughts of the
characters. This seems to be where Kentridge is articulating the internal worlds, thoughts and feelings
of the characters’ the existential crisis of Woyzeck versus the placid worlds of the Captain and the
Doctor. While interesting in its surreal nature, it is no different to a string of short films on SBS’s Eat
Carpet, fine for late night viewing but hard to relate to the narrative on stage.
It is a fine thing for companies to retell established works in new and inter-cultural ways. It is also
good to see a combination of theatrical conventions used to tell a story. A director, however, needs to
remember that theatre’s main role is to engage in a relationship with the audience, to tell a coherent
story and to communicate themes that strike a chord with the audience. Stories need to be told well in
order to challenge pre-conceived notions of life and human behaviour. Woyzeck on the Highveld does
not do this effectively and the result is a production that remains out of reach for most people.
http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2519,
17/04/2011, accessed 21/09/2011
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