Rachel Cucheron & Katelyn Doyle in Woyzeck | Photo provided by the company
I’ve now experienced two adaptations of iconic 19th century German theatre-works within a month of each other. As with Soulpepper’s Spring Awakening, I’m not really familiar with Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck—a sad little allegory about some poor schmo who honours a bad faith social contract that ultimately destroys him—so can’t properly evaluate Holger Syme’s modern adaptation. This production by Claw Marks Theatre, though, does solidify for me how thoroughly those Germans were tapping into a whole laugh and feel bad mood with lyrical, tragi-comic scenarios of the Individual crushed by Society.
Another big player in the German scene, Bertolt Brecht, is rattling about director Maggie Tavares’ staging—which features a slew of alienating devices from gender dissociative casting and heightened performance to meta-theatrical artifice. Title cards like “THE PLAY IS OVER” are quintessentially Brechtian and the show’s intermission is impressively disconcerting, with the cast milling about in character during most of it, blurring the edges between narrative reality and the theatre-going experience. Their resources are modest and it’s apparent that Tavares, cast and design team are fully leaning into the scrappiness. This doesn’t always work, but when it does (most significantly in the second act), it’s rather chilling.
A poor solider in Büchner’s original, Franz Woyzeck (Rachel Cucheron) is a night shift hospital janitor here trying to makes ends meet by performing bizarre jobs for his boss, the Captain (Nezar El-Rayes), and subjecting himself to equally strange and humiliating experiments by the Doctor (Arjun Kalra). El-Rayes and Kalra certainly understand the assignment and give the most discernibly motivated of the over-the-top, flamboyant performances, contrasting well with Cucheron’s considerably more muted, timidly eager vibe.
Nezar El-Rayes & Rachel Cucheron in Woyzeck | Photo provided by the company
As Marie, the woman Woyzeck is shacked up with and the mother of his child, Katelyn Doyle was a stand-out for me. She’s giving the most naturalistic and nuanced performance here, which makes her something of an outlier. It’s not that we like her as she cheats on Woyzeck with a cartoonishly macho DJ Major D (Sofia ‘Stevie’ Garcia, who’s hilariously hamming it up), but she’s undeniably real and that makes her violent end genuinely disturbing.
It was hard for me, though, to invest in most of the first act. While Gabe Woo’s costumes do give a solid sense of where these people fit into the social fabric, the performances are not consistently compelling. Absurdity is tricky to pull off persuasively and it’s hit or miss here, especially when the aesthetic feels so initially sloppy.
Where the first act, which plays more for comedy, feels a bit unfocused and visually unremarkable (until a phantasmagorical club scene), the atmosphere of the second act is an eerie and baleful contrast. The use of jittery spotlights creates an especially bleak and alienating ambiance as Wozjeck’s mental state unravels and he slides inexorably towards his own awful conclusion. Cucheron’s depiction comes into sharper focus during this doomy second half.
The terrible moment of Marie’s murder is thoroughly enhanced by Shunsho Ando Heng’s ominously cool and glitchy lighting. There is a subtle strobe effect that reminded me of the final, devastating scene in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (one of the most viscerally appalling murder scenes I’ve ever experienced—so a significant achievement).
Tavares is credited as props designer, so I’m guessing she’s responsible for the grotesquely cute puppet that Karen Edelist manipulates as a satirically vaudevillian commentator. Is it a fetus with a top hat? A handsomely dressed-up sperm? Whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s very Muppets meet David Lynch and I was on-board.
My appreciation for this rough-around-the-edges production ebbed and flowed wildly, which Tavares seems to have anticipated with a particularly moving admission in her director’s note, which indicates an awareness and embracing of the production’s shortcomings: “This Woyzeck isn’t perfect. I don’t know if any production can be perfect, but this is quite palpably the Woyzeck of a 23-year-old. This is my Woyzeck…”
Yes, this Woyzeck does read as assertively youthful, justifiably angst-ridden by the systemic ills of the world, paradoxically both naive and jaded—which is part of its charm.
Woyzeck
September 20 to October 4, 2026
Arraymusic’s Array Space
(155 Walnut Ave.)
90 minutes (including intermission)
Karen Edelist in Woyzeck | Photo provided by the company