{"id":1494,"date":"2017-05-24T00:29:39","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T23:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1494"},"modified":"2017-05-24T00:29:39","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T23:29:39","slug":"the-hole-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2017\/05\/the-hole-story.html","title":{"rendered":"The hole story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Georg B\u00fcchner died in 1837 with his masterpiece unfinished \u2013 a masterpiece because<\/em> it\u2019s unfinished, perhaps. The text of Woyzeck<\/em><\/a> is incomplete, the scenes disordered. Based on a real-life murder, it gives naturalism a swerve, and the holes and fractures have lured many subsequent theatre artists. (The one that sticks with me is Robert Wilson\u2019s collaboration with Tom Waits: stylised, scarlet-drenched music theatre.)<\/p>\n

Jack Thorne<\/a>, by his own admission, isn\u2019t a holes kind of writer, and his new version for London\u2019s Old Vic diligently fills in the gaps. Time (May 1981) and place (with the British army in West Berlin) are defined; Frank Woyzeck\u2019s foster-care childhood (bruised by abuse and neglect) and his unhappy army career (including a calamitous tour of Belfast) are detailed. We learn how he met his girlfriend Marie, why they\u2019re together, about her background too. Even colleagues, captain and the captain\u2019s wife bring their backstories to the table.<\/p>\n

Thorne also makes the main location ickily present \u2013 the \u2018meat flat\u2019 above a butcher\u2019s shop that is all that Woyzeck and Marie can afford, raising their baby within the flesh stench. But Tom Scutt \u2013 who previously designed<\/a> a production of Berg\u2019s operatic version teeming with seamy detail \u2013 creates a queasily mobile setting. The stage is defined by ranks of panels, descending from above or sliding in from the sides \u2013 depending on Neil Austin\u2019s keening lighting, they\u2019re textured like concrete breezeblocks or muffled with padding. They might be forbidding sections of the Berlin Wall; they\u2019re each as anonymous as a brigade drill; they\u2019re grim and grey as the cold war city, an east-west fracture to be policed just as Woyzeck polices his own increasingly untenable fracture.<\/p>\n

The slabs start monolithic but don\u2019t hold up. Their surface rends, revealing a flare of blood-red wound, or a sanguine rip of offally tubes and lumps. Visceral is an overused critical adjective, but that\u2019s precisely what we see here.<\/p>\n

A history of violence<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Joe Murphy\u2019s production, it makes for an expressively un-expressionist reading. And this chimes with Thorne\u2019s desire to foreground what he says \u2018is often described as the first working-class tragedy\u2019 \u2013 because too much abstraction might aestheticise or distract from a hero pinioned by class. Steffan Rhodri and Nancy Carroll could hardly be more posh as the quixotic captain and his rorty wife \u2013 barking their lines and stabbing their superiority like fish knives. Theirs is the voice of assurance \u2013 Woyzeck\u2019s, as John Boyega plays him, the wondering tone of someone trying to fit in.<\/p>\n

Woyzeck\u2019s mind and body become public property \u2013 marshalled by the army, meddled by the doctor, helplessly nurtured by Sarah Green\u2019s Marie. Boyega\u2019s quietly muscled bulk is perfect for the role \u2013 he\u2019s a big man and a quiet one, a strong man and a softie. He holds a history of violence that makes him more likely to slam his head into a wall than flare outwards. It\u2019s striking in this production \u2013 and in a play which places its hero\u2019s physical and psychic being under such relentless scrutiny \u2013 that no one mentions race. It\u2019s up to us to notice that he\u2019s the only non-white character, and to wonder what part, if any, that plays in his distress. It also means the final scene, of harm and self-harm, may play out with unspoken echoes of Othello \u2013 another warrior hero whose virtues are warped by the world and turned against themselves.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a rare silence in a version that fills silences, that makes the fragments fit. Incompletion makes B\u00fcchner\u2019s play seem arrestingly current; filling the gaps as Thorne does describes a palpable progress into torment.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter \u2013 @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Georg B\u00fcchner died in 1837 with his masterpiece unfinished \u2013 a masterpiece because it\u2019s unfinished, perhaps. The text of Woyzeck is incomplete, the scenes disordered. Based on a real-life murder, it gives naturalism a swerve, and the holes and fractures have lured many subsequent theatre artists. (The one that sticks with me is Robert Wilson\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,452],"class_list":{"0":"post-1494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-theatre","9":"tag-tom-scutt","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1496,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494\/revisions\/1496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}