Woyzeck review: how much should a play deviate from its original?

From his screen success as Finn, the runaway stormtrooper in Star Trek, to the starring role in George Büchner’s Woyzeck, John Boyega has just shown us that he has the alembic magic to move confidently from screen to stage. Boyega has impressed critics this week in the Old Vic’s staging of Büchner’s searing 19th-century play. It’s a story well ahead of its time in dealing empathetically with the plight of an underclass trapped in the military machine, grim domestic violence, and puzzles of free will and determinism.

But it is not Büchner, so really it should not say it is. It has about as much to do with his poetic distillation of 19th-century militarism and disconnection as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless has with Jane Austen’s Emma, which is to say, as a crafty but distant cousin of the original. But then Heckerling didn’t call her star, Alicia Silverstone, Emma Woodhouse.

In the Old Vic’s Woyzeck, Boyega is a Belfast-traumatised squaddie with an Irish Catholic mistress, patrolling the 1980s Berlin Wall and living above a Muslim butcher’s shop, while repelling the awkwardly gay advances of the play’s ghastly captain. This, to put it politely, is an awful lot of baggage. Add to all that the very 2017 rebirth of Marie as a clear-headed feminist sort rather than the lost, desperate and nihilistic creature of Büchner’s creation.

Sense of period goes awol: neither reactionary early 19th-century Germany nor the chills of the late Cold War rely on the view that if the British army is involved in something, it must be oppressive. (If you want real conditions under authoritarianism, try the barracks of the old East Germany. By army standards, Berlin was a far more agreeable posting than the dismal heaths of West Germany.)

Directors naturally contend that free adaptation is what the living theatre is all about. But watching the Sovremennik Theatre’s intense Russian-language Chekhov is markedly different to, say, a demotic Andrew Upton version at the National. We can relish them both.

But a play is, to get all German about it, a Ding an sich — a thing in itself. It is elastic, but too much pulling at its fabric distorts shape and meaning. The same thought occurred watching a game attempt by a young ensemble at the Union Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet, re-incarnated as a gay footballing couple in the Premier League.

Dramatic purpose and impact end up buried under the accretions. The classics are eternal and pliable — that is their delight. But if you really want to do a play about something else, write one that alludes to the original, rather than awkwardly repurposes it. As Shakespeare never said: remake it, make it, and don’t fake it.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist and presents the arts and ideas show Free Thinking on BBC Radio3