Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✩✩✩
by Georg Büchner, directed by Laura Nanni
One Man Tag, Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto
July 4-13, 2002
"Strong Woyzeck, Weak Production"
In the Toronto Fringe Festival programme for 2002, One Man Tag Productions promises its "Woyzeck" will be "a fresh interpretation of Büchner's nightmarish story through a carnival of sounds and images". If you think that means an exciting multimedia production of Büchner's famous but seldom seen play, think again. I'm happy that this young company is giving Toronto audiences to see the play, but disappointed that the level of acting, production and direction is more like a mediocre student production. It's not remotely carnivalesque and the interpretation is the standard one.
This is a pity because German drama from 1750-1850 in general and Georg Büchner in particular have been sorely neglected by Ontario theatre companies. "Woyzeck" by Georg Büchner (1813-1837) has long been a repertory work in European theatres ever since its author was discovered by the Expressionists and was later proclaimed the "father of modern drama" by Brecht and Artaud. His literary works were ignored in his own short lifetime and for almost 90 years after his death ("Woyzeck" was first performed in 1921). Now they are seen has forerunners of most of the trends of 20th-century drama. If Büchner's tale of a poor soldier driven mad by social oppression is known to North Americans at all, it is most likely through Alban Berg's opera 1925 "Wozzeck" (the name was misspelled in Berg's source) or perhaps from Werner Herzog's 1979 film starring Klaus Kinski.
The best feature of the show is the excellent performance of Jacob Gallagher-Ross in the title role. Woyzeck is already having auditory and visual delusions when we first meet him, each successive wave becoming more unbearable. Gallagher-Ross is able not only to gradate Woyzeck's levels of madness but to sustain his intensity throughout the play's 90 minutes. His Woyzeck's natural expression is of the haunted or hunted. His performance makes clear that Woyzeck breaks because he is searching for morality and meaning in a world that has neither.
Like Gallagher-Ross the rest of the cast and crew are either currently enrolled or have recently graduated from drama programmes. To make "Woyzeck" seem like the living nightmare it is, the other actors have to match Woyzeck in intensity and the action, through fragmentary, has to build relentlessly in tension. This is not what happens in One Man Tag's production. Many of the actors are quite good: Matt White as Woyzeck's arrogant, philosophical Captain; Nicolas Carella rather better as the French-accented barker than Woyzeck's tyrannous Doctor; Claudio Chiodo excellent at displaying the Drum Major's bestial, specifically feline, nature; and Katherine Cook, mostly silent but effective as the Idiot in the first half and a Child in the second.
A major source of energy loss is Nicola Correia-Damude as Marie, a prostitute, the mother of Woyzeck's child and lover of the Drum Major. It is to Marie that Woyzeck mistakenly looks for some form of morality though his growing madness does force her to examine the motives for her actions. Correia-Damude is hampered in bringing out any of Marie's complexity by an acting technique indebted, it appears, solely to sitcoms and teen movies. Paul Hardy as Woyzeck's friend Andres and Lara Berry as Margaret fail to make an impression.
Director Laura Nanni discards Scene 26 (in most accepted ordering) that shows Woyzeck alive at the end. She also does not have drown when searching for his knife as happens in both the opera and the film. Instead she has the cast sing Woyzeck the same lullaby Marie had sung earlier to her child. Ah, so Woyzeck is a child of society? That's already clear since his madness is induced in part from the experimental diet he lives on from the Doctor to earn a bit more money for his family. This is a play where image echoes image. Woyzeck is said to run through life like "an open razor", but when we see him shave the Captain with a Bic, not a straight razor, it's obvious Nanni is not paying enough attention to details.
"Woyzeck" deserves a fully professional, well-considered production in Ontario. Like Büchner's other plays, "Leonce and Lena" and "Danton's Death", it sadly lies outside the current mandate of the Shaw Festival. It would be a natural for Soulpepper or, if it lives up to its promise, Stratford's new Studio Theatre. I hope one or the other takes on the risk of presenting a play that is still unsettling after more than 160 years.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Toronto Fringe Festival logo.
2002-07-12
Woyzeck