With Woyzeck and Marie, the socially disadvantaged appear for the first time as tragic protagonists in modern German drama. Büchner had studied criminal cases of his time and used his WOYZECK to ask how freely people can make decisions at all. The fragment exists in four manuscripts, only the earliest of which contains the murder scene. Shortly before his death, the 23-year-old author fanned out layer by layer the psychological and social tensions that drive Woyzeck to murder. It is above all the violent social environment, the craftsmen and burghers, who incite Woyzeck to kill Marie. In Büchner's play, femicide is not a private crime, but a social one. He portrays the representatives of this society in a correspondingly iconic and monstrous way - the violent drum major, the perfidious doctor, the cynical captain and the swaggering craftsmen. Büchner's text is itself like a knife that pierces the shell of social conventions and exposes human instincts and desires. In her third Dresden production, in-house director Lily Sykes stages Büchner's fragment full of sensuality, violence, humor and poetry.
Duration of the performance: approx. 1 hour and 30 minutes.
No intermission.