Woyzeck

In the organizer's words:

"'Woyzeck' is about madness and about obsessions, about children and about murder - all things that touch us. The play is wild and horny and exciting and imagination-stimulating. It makes you fear for the characters and think about your own life. I guess that's all you can ask of a play." Tom Waits

At just 23 years old, Georg Büchner began writing his visually stunning and - for its time - visionary play Woyzeck. The unfinished fragment is one of the most famous texts in German literature. Woyzeck, a simple soldier, serves a captain as a barber. He is unable to support his lover Marie and their child on his earnings, which is why he also hires himself out as a medical test subject. The consequences of the experiments weaken Woyzeck, who is already scarred by the hard life, to such an extent that he loses himself more and more in a world of delusions that finally engulfs him.

"Every man is an abyss, it dizzies one to look down". These lines, which Büchner put into Woyzeck's mouth, aptly describe his view of man and society. And so Woyzeck too - despite his upright efforts to be a good man - ends up staggering towards the abyss, trapped in a society that can be no support for him in life.

ERSAN MONDTAG's works have been performed internationally, have won several awards, and have been invited to various festivals, including the Berlin Theatertreffen. Mondtag pursues a performative as well as interdisciplinary approach that addresses mechanisms of our psyche and shows victims and perpetrators of language and rationality.



A co-production with the Scharoun Theater Wolfsburg. This content has been machine translated.