Woyzeck
The citizens of Leipzig looked with similar horror on Johann Woyzeck. On June 21, 1821, the 40-year-old former soldier and occasional barber and bookbinder heard a voice telling him to stab a woman who’d been his lover. After buying a new handle for his knife, he wandered about the city, almost throwing the weapon into a nearby pond but thinking better of it. He spotted the woman by chance on the street, forced her to let him walk her home, then stabbed her seven times. Quickly apprehended, he confessed to the murder and announced, “God let her be dead. She deserves it for what she did to me.”
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The case seemed open-and-shut, but stories of Woyzeck’s mental instability resulted in a court-ordered examination. The doctor said he found an intelligent, articulate man with no apparent abnormalities save a slightly enlarged right testicle. Woyzeck was sentenced to die on November 13, 1822, but a private citizen’s petition chronicling the killer’s long history of visual and auditory hallucinations stayed the execution–until the same doctor who’d conducted the initial evaluation wrote a contradictory, self-congratulatory report again certifying Woyzeck’s sanity. He insisted that the man exhibited no unusual shape; no blemishes, scars, or birthmarks; not even bad breath. His eyes were “not at all wild, insolent, disturbed, unsteady or confused,” and in his face one found “nothing deceitful, malicious, repulsive or uncanny.” He was one of us. The convicted man was beheaded on August 27, 1824, leading to a long and furious debate over the new insanity defense.
Fortunately for the world of theater he did, through the infamous case then still on everyone’s mind: the crime of Johann Woyzeck, executed when Buchner was only ten. But rather than bolstering Woyzeck’s insanity defense, as a good liberal of his day might have done, Buchner turned the criminal into one of us, creating an enigmatic yet pitiable figure, a hapless soldier desperate to keep his faith. In Woyzeck’s world, which seems to grow darker by the second, people are divorced from their natures and rattle about just waiting for their empty slice of eternity to end. Woyzeck’s captain whiles away the time watching women pass by on the sidewalk yet bursts into tears at the sight of his coat hanging on a wall. The town doctor conducts endless experiments–he puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas–hoping to find scientific justification for human actions, including Woyzeck’s need to pee in an alley on his way home from work. Even the animals in this world are idle and denatured. A carnival barker slaps a coat and saber on a monkey and calls him a soldier. When the monkey takes a bow, the barker cries, “Now you are a baron at least.”
It seems European Repertory never decided what Woyzeck is about, or why the questions it raises are still pressing 165 years later. Yet a look at today’s headlines provides all the context one needs.
