A naked man stands nervously on stage. Another man, who appears to be a physician but is wearing stilettos and holding a leather whip, approaches and forces the first man to eat peas and urinate. This is one of many provocative scenes in Woyzeck, a theatrical production directed by Frenchman Franck Dimech and featuring actors from Taipei and Shanghai. The international collaboration is currently playing at the Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre (牯嶺街小劇場).
Dimech said he has long wanted to adapt the dramatic work of the same title by German playwright Georg Buchner, whose piece centers on a man who is gradually degraded and eventually crushed by society.
Woyzeck tells the tragic tale of a poor soldier who lives with a woman named Marie and her illegitimate son. To support the family, Woyzeck performs menial tasks for The Captain and sells his body to The Doctor for medical experiments. The experiments soon take a toll on the soldier, who begins to experience hallucinations as his mental health gradually deteriorates.
Photo courtesy of Hsu Pin
Though Buchner’s play was incomplete at the time of the author’s death in 1837 at age of 23, that did not prevent the work from becoming one of the most important plays in modern theater history. It is, Dimech says, exactly because of its fragmentary state that the play receives such recognition.
“The fragmented play fell into obscurity and was revived during the early 20th century. It was a time when a director’s job began to be perceived as artistic and creative. An interesting coincidence,” the director said. “Though the work has its inherent logic, we [directors] always imagine we have the power and freedom to reconstruct it much in the same way that a film is edited using different cuts. That is the way the play became a Western classic.”
To Dimech, his rendition of Woyzeck is an attempt to juxtapose the Western text with a more ritualistic, poetic Eastern aesthetic, manifested through the bodies of the Asian actors he works with.
Photo courtesy of Hsu Pin
He has developed a long-term collaboration with Komaba Agora Theater in Tokyo and, more recently, teamed up with Taiwan’s Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group (莎士比亞的妹妹們的劇團) to stage French theater director and writer Fabrice Dupuy’s Jumel last year. Dimech says he is drawn to working with “foreign actors” and creating works using their native languages, which he does not understand.
In the case of Woyzeck, the cast is made up of eight performers from Taiwan and China and a Taipei-based Malaysian actor.
“Because of the language barrier, I must expend more effort on reading the actors’ behavior and body language and feeling how they understand and sense things,” the director said. “To feel and experience one’s relation to others is an important aspect of the work. I very much rely on how my actors and I challenge and collide into one another. This way, it creates a new space for the imagination.”
Dimech’s focus on actors makes his Woyzeck a welcome antidote to the tech-savvy, multimedia productions that are all the rage in today’s
theater world. His play is a lucid, sober study of madness, with ideas conveyed and explored through the physical grit and emotional urgency of the performers.
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