By Kerry Freek
Based loosely on a true story (told through the eyes of dramatist Karl Georg Büchner), Woyzeck tells the sad tale of a man driven mad by societal forces, culminating in the murder his girlfriend and his execution. Since Büchner never finished the play, his study of medical ethics, vast societal change and madness has been adapted and reworked by several other artists.
Ted Witzel, co-director of the red light district (a small but mighty Toronto company with a mandate to make “urgent” theatre), is the next in line to tackle the play. Trained at University of Toronto’s University College Drama Program, Witzel also spent some time studying and working in theatre in Germany. While he was there, he translated Büchner’s raw Woyzeck texts, the result of which is a challenging new production running June 3-19 at Lower Ossington Theatre. Last week I met with Witzel to discuss the show.
MONDO: Many people have had their hands in Woyzeck, from Karl Emil Franzos’s reworked version to Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. How much of your production would you say is from Büchner’s original, unfinished text?
Ted Witzel: The version that we translated was Büchner’s raw material. Because this play is so fucking good, I didn’t do much to it. I’ve tried to translate it, but what I really like about Büchner’s writing is that it’s this weird scientific dialect. I’ve tried to maintain it.
So it’s like a patois of his making?
Yes. It’s a fake language he’s using to create the feeling of this lower class. I love the fucked-up syntax in it so much. When I translated it, I didn’t try to create a dialect – you’d have to turn to Cockney or Newfie, and it just wouldn’t resonate in Toronto. I based my work mostly on Büchner’s weird syntax. The word order isn’t wrong – it’s just poetic, heightened, different. And it works nicely because Woyzeck’s going nuts; he has this strange way of seeing the world and a strange way of expressing himself. Each of characters has a different, strange syntax, and I tried to capture that by playing with word order and grammatical structures. It was really fun for me as a grammar nerd to figure out how each of these characters would speak in English.
Before we started the interview, you talked about Büchner’s original text being like a television show that occasionally goes to static – it shorts out in places and begins again elsewhere. Have you maintained that quality for this production?
In a few places. For one scene, Büchner wrote four beginnings and only finished the scene on the fourth try. I’ve directed the play to be structured out of Woyzeck’s mind – you never know if what you’re seeing is how he sees it, or if it’s actually real. I’ve gone the expressionist route.
The whole play is a flashback in the moment before he’s executed. He remembers the events that led him to this position. As his mad, addled brain – he’s eaten nothing but peas for months – tries to reconstruct these events, that one scene with these three false starts is interspersed throughout the play. It’s seen as the thesis statement; it’s the scene that really causes Woyzeck to come unwound.
What draws you to this play?
It’s a hard question to answer because Büchner is so complicated. He comes from three points for me. He’s a scientist; he’s a doctor. He’s doing a case study with this play. It’s based on fact. He’s also a political radical – he was exiled from his home state of Hessen. He’s also a dramatist by passion. I love that tripartite structure, where he’s dealing with issues that are political, scientific and artistic all at once.
What really gets me is that Büchner sees this [true story of a Leipzig man beheaded for murder of his girlfriend in 1821] as a gross miscarriage of justice. By all accounts, he’s guilty. He’s killed her. By writing this play, an examination of justice, Büchner’s begging the question: can society not be held partly responsible for the monsters it creates?
It’s this world he shows that’s driving Woyzeck mad. It’s a place that’s changed way too fast for this poor little guy – our first working-class, proletariat hero – to understand. He’s lost in this world of changes in philosophy and belief, this limbo post-Napoleon. It’s just stopped making sense, and he’s looking so hard for this thing that everyone else seems to understand. Everybody seems to be okay living in this crazy world, but Woyzeck has no quiet.
I’ve read a bit about Büchner’s thoughts on medical ethics. With Woyzeck, is he making a case for further exploration and understanding of mental illness?
That’s something else that really draws me to the play: madness, and how it’s portrayed. Büchner has put not only Woyzeck, a madman, on stage, but also an idiot (called Idiot). Even Idiot gets along in this world — and he’s batshit! But what we get from Woyzeck is a profound search for the truth. He’s looking for a deeper truth, and that’s kind of where he goes wrong. He tries too hard to understand, where everyone else creates some easy answer or mantra. “Virtue, Woyzeck, virtue!” says one character. But Woyzeck won’t accept easy answers.
Even now, we don’t know what to do with madness. Look at Vince Li. Batshit crazy. Guilty. We can say he’s not criminally responsible [for the Greyhound incident] because he’s clearly schizotypal, but where do go beyond that? In the play, they just execute Woyzeck – he’s like a fingernail that’s grown too long.
What should we do with madness?
I think we should be exploring it. I don’t know what the answer is, but I see a problem, and I want to say something about it. Let’s open a dialogue. We should be trying to understand where madness comes from. Woyzeck is showing us that there are causes.
the red light district’s production of Woyzeck runs June 3-19 @ Lower Ossington Theatre. Read MONDO’s review of last year’s rld show, The Misanthrope, here.
