Glitter, Insanity, Decay: God’s Away On Business

He never even finished this nightmarish jigsaw puzzle of a play. Georg Buechner died in 1837 at the age of 23, leaving the world with a handful of powerful plays and prose pieces and the bitter taste of “all that could have been…”. His most famous play Woyzeck remained a mere fragment. Poverty, exploitation, morality and jealousy all whirled up into a simple, painful story: A poor man, humiliated, dehumanized, exploited by the authorities and betrayed by is mistress, is driven into insanity, murder and ultimate death.
A story this dark, so full of despair and human fault and failure – could anyone picture an appropriate soundtrack unless written by Tom Waits? His brute, dramatic and bitter songs that tell of the American underbelly turn Buechner’s Woyzeck into a bizarre satiric Broadway show. Glitter and dust fly through the air in a grotesque dance on the thin dividing line between slapstick and freak show, musical and realistic theatre.
Maybe that’s what I enjoy about a great number of theatre productions these days: they combine the abstract with the realist. They play with the artificiality of the stage, while simultaneously screaming at the top of their lungs: “All the world’s a stage!”
The present production of Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Robert Wilson’s version of Woyzeck at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre does exactly that: The songs are overly dramatic, ironic, ridiculous; the stage design is something between a giant cobweb and the bars of a prison; the props are rare and mainly symbolic; but the actions and feelings remain realistic.

You’re trapped in a spider’s web and God’s away on business.