Woyzeck. Ordinary tragedy – Moscow truth

March 11 and 12 at 18.00 at the Theater. Vl. Mayakovsky (Scene on Sretenka), the premiere of the play “Woyzeck” based on the play by Georg Buchner directed by Philip Gurevich will take place. Artists – Anna Agafonova, Anton Troshin. Starring Ilya Nikulin and Valeria Kulikova, as well as Vladimir Guskov, Yulia Marycheva, Dmitry Garnov and Roman Fomin.

The unfinished play by the 19th-century German playwright, scholar and poet Georg Büchner is based on the documentary story of a Leipzig barber named Woyzeck. Out of jealousy, he killed his wife and was sentenced to death. In the world-famous plot, mastered by opera, ballet, and cinema, the hero becomes a soldier who is subjected to medical experiments. Buechner knew this firsthand: he was known to his contemporaries as the author of a course on comparative human anatomy.

Director Philip Gurevich offers to look at Woyzeck not as a drama of a small person suppressed by the majority, but as an everyday tragedy, one step away from which each of us is. The creators compose the world of German expressionism, expressive in its rigidity, with zongs and live music. Spectators find themselves inside the playing space, in direct contact with the artists, and become participants in the trial of the hero. Woyzeck, driven into a stage circle – a man or an insect? Victim or killer? How to get out of the swamp of circumstances that force you to violence? By passing judgment on the hero’s past, the viewer foresees his own future.

Philip Gurevich: “It is important for us that the audience uncompromisingly understand what is happening. Woyzeck has tunnel thinking, he is initially put in a stalemate. There is no time to think and empathize when he himself is forced to survive. This makes the text of the century before last related to our feeling of today. The tragedy of Woyzeck is that there was not a single person nearby who would take his hand and say: please stop. Salvation, support, God – in yourself, in a friend, in a family, in a cause to which you are devoted.

Irina Shvedova.

Photo courtesy of the theatre’s press office.