Woyzeck is the last and the most acclaimed of plays written by the then 23-year-old Karl Georg Büchner (1813-1837), shortly before his untimely death. An unfinished and fragmentary text, yet as effective as a delay-action bomb. Published almost half a century after the author’s demise and premiered on stage only in 1913, it became a source of inspiration for future generations – for nineteenth-century naturalists, for early twentieth-century expressionists, and for Bertolt Brecht. Woyzeck has passed the test of time, proving in each consecutive epoch an indispensable and contemporary text. 

What is Woyzeck about? About humiliation, love, and jealousy? About an attempt to flee the claustrophobic small-town (small-world) atmosphere? About the violence of hierarchy in the guise of morality and the subjugating force of science? About social conditioning imprinted on the human flesh? About sensitivity verging on madness? About the fluid borderlines between humanity and beastliness, between freedom and predetermination? About “how an individual matures and reaches freedom”? About the inevitable social revolution? About the auguries of the shapes of fungi on the ground?

Who is Woyzeck? A victim of betrayal and humiliation? An oversensitive visionary, attuned to the sounds of nature and to the hum of the impending apocalypse? An ignorant harbinger of a people’s uprising that will put paid to social injustice? Or a small-time fool forced – through belittlement and jealousy – to commit a heinous crime? Or – simultaneously – is he perhaps the alter ego of Büchner? 

A small-scale show directed by Maciej Gorczyński and staged with the participation of the students and graduates of the Faculty of Dance Theatre in Bytom brings to the fore the viscous, corporeal and material tissue of the text, at the same time breaking free from the confines of the realist-naturalist adaptations of Woyzeck. 

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Maciej Gorczyński

Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Gdańsk and in Drama Directing from the National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. He began his artistic path in the off-theatres in Trójmiasto, including the Stajnia Pegaza Theatre.

Between 2008 and 2012, together with Alicja Mojko, he established Teatr Lustra Strona Druga, a students’ theatre. Between 2011 and 2013, as an actor and singer, he took part in the international “Song of Songs” project by Sergey Kovalevich and Natalia Polovynek (Grotowski Institute in Wrocław / Word and Voice Centre in Lviv / Hectar Center in Russia). In the years 2006–2009 and from 2013 onward, a collaborator of the Gardzienice Theatre Practices Centre, where he directed six performances, including three of his own original performances in the framework of the project “Gardzienice: Generator of Hope.” He debuted in 2014 at the Solski Theatre in Tarnów with Summer 1910, a performance based on the play by Z. Bojda. He collaborated with the Shakespeare Foundation, Mały Theatre in Tychy, and the Drama Reading Room in Lublin, among others.