Woyzeck

Woyzeck is a play so charged with novelty that it has provoked innumerable interpretations and it still shows no sign of settling down into any fixed meaning. Because its central character is the first proletarian protagonist treated tragically in western drama, Woyzeck has been hailed by theatre historians as the first truly modern play, but no one will need to be reminded how topical a play about sexual betrayal, domestic violence, and manic outbursts of homicidal rage still is. Woyzeck has never been out of fashion and each new generation has found it a mirror of the world we live in. This single short play has fed generation after generation of avant-garde, cutting edge, and next wave movements in the theatre.

Now two of the most established youth focussed companies in Perth combine for the first time to present this powerful production under the direction of German theatre practitioner Allan Mathiasch. The University Dramatic Society, over the last half-century, and The Broken Limb Theatre Company, through the past decade, have shown a dedication to the progression of the talent of young Perth artists. Now in a time where collaboration and experimentation come hand in hand, Mathiasch brings together a group of young players to tell the tale of a man, conditionally programmed by medical science, who commits a terrible crime.

The play we know today as Woyzeck began as a drawerful of fragments left by the brilliant 22-year-old playwright Georg Büchner who died of typhus in 1836. Büchner's unfinished script lay dormant until it was published in 1879 and finally produced in 1913 (Alban Berg composed the well-known operatic version -Wozzeck- in 1925) and today Woyzeck is recognised as a modernist classic.