Nobody puts Schubert in the corner: Woyzeck in Winter at the Barbican
Woyzeck in Winter
Landmark Productions
Barbican Theatre
Upper Circle A62, £16, upgraded to Stalls P25
15 September 2017
Barbican page
Why would you pair Woyzeck and Winterreise? Why wouldn't you pair Woyzeck and Winterreise? Dangerous questions (why do anything?) but the novelty of Woyzeck in Winter insists upon them. If you suppose similarity is a reason to pair things, there are several that join these two art works: tonal colour, original language, era. There is also an important dissimilarity: one is a play (alright, fragments of a play) and one is a song cycle. It's an Ariadne auf Naxos situation: forgetting whether or not they should be melded, how can they be melded?
Just as Ariadne is definitely an opera and not a vaudeville comedy, so Woyzeck in Winter is definitely a play and not at all a song cycle. The extent to which it is not a song cycle was too much for my sensitive friend, who had to leave half-way through and now fears Winterreise has been ruined forever. I think this is an overreaction: but it's certainly true that if you hold the Schubert sacred Woyzeck in Winter holds only horror, and not in a good way.
The chief failure is of course aural. Despite the Barbican's description of the cast as 'singer-actors', the cast is of actors, none of whom are singers. This being the case, they are all amplified, quite heavily: not so unpleasant from my plush seat in the middle of the stalls, but had I been as near a speaker as I was for Obsession perhaps I would have been as traumatized as my sensitive friend. Even so, there is an annoying disregard for the reality of sound: this production is surely the perfect opportunity for a real hurdy-gurdy, but instead we got a fake hurdy-gurdy and the recording of a real one; the real bashing of real piano carcasses onstage was accompanied by additional recordings of bashed pianos. Why?
It's disappointing but maybe not that surprising that a theatre team should care less about sound than classical music fans do. So, accepting that Winterreise has been appropriated with less care than is its due, what role is it made to play in Büchner's drama? I think it's a fun idea to have the hurdy-gurdy man as a malicious spirit driving Woyzeck to his destruction (and it gives them an easy get-out at the ending). The music's folkic inspiration might be considered suitable background for Woyzeck's position as the despised everyman. Some of the imagery retained from Müller's poetry has a startling resonance within Woyzeck (particularly 'Die Nebensonnen'). And of course, as well as being masterful Lieder, the songs of Winterreise have great tunes that are always a pleasure to hear.
Is this worth the sacrifice? I'm not sure. I do know, though, that I was moved by the production as a whole: while not to the extremity of the effect of Berg's Wozzeck, I was left still with the same sadness that for all we may understand our fellow man's suffering, we often couldn't care less, and that that is as true now as it was in Büchner and Schubert's time.
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