Press
Woyzeck, Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009
Review by Barky Matthews
from Three Weeks
A pretty splendid production from Splendid Productions. Ashen-faced, scarlet-cheeked and elegantly-waistcoated, the three cast members jovially escort you to your seat and engage you with charming pleasantries.
Then the show begins with a banging of drums and they become a very sort-of roll-up, roll-up theatrical troop. Appropriately, given how this, Georg Buchner's unfinished work was discovered - as a mixed up collection of pages - it isn't performed in chronological order. This creates confusion initially and cohesion later on; by commencing with the brutal murder scene, it becomes more effective than typical constructions.
Particularly magnificent was the actress Kerry Frampton who played three very different characters; my special favourite was her portrayal of the captain which amused me endlessly. Vibrant and vivacious theatre!
Review by Graeme Strachan
from www.britishtheatreguide.info
Georg Büchner's seminal play Woyzeck is given a bizarre and beautiful turn by Splendid Productions. Opting to clear up the dubious problems of the uncompleted manuscript by presenting the entire work as a series of non-chronological vignettes interspersed with vaudevillian musical medleys and cheerful chirping, the company have created what has to rank as one of the most colourful and intelligent interpretations of the work since Tom Waits and Robert Wilson go their hands on it.
Rather than dryly play out the admittedly dull story, they instead make light out of hammering out the meat of the play with a deft accompaniment of percussion and some excellent singing; including a moment of inspired lunacy in encouraging the entire audience to sing along with a musical rendition of the line "Stab, Stab, Stab the bitch dead."
As well as subverting the usual interpretations, Splendid tear down the flimsy pretence of comedy subtly throughout the play as Woyzeck continually wears away his greasepaint from a clownish palid face replete with rosy cheeks to the grim harrowed face of a madman consumed by his guilt. The repetition of the fatalistic murder scene never ceases to be harrowing and seems to change in meaning throughout and gain resonance from the surrounding scenes no matter how anachronistic.
For those looking for something intelligent and different, you couldn't go far wrong with this production and those who think they know Woyzeck should see how it appears after seeing it from a new angle.
Review by Deborah Klayman
Splendid Productions have acheived the impossible – they’ve made Woyzeck fun! This innovative production takes Büchner’s classic text and put a new spin on it, throwing out the notion that a play should be shown in chronological order, and instead presenting the 24 acts in different styles and order, even repeating one (Scene 18) three times, to great effect.
As the audience enters, the white-faced performers chat to them, asking for show recommendations, bantering, and generally setting them at ease. A variety of instruments are being played, and many more sit at the sides, with only a metal frame with cloth for a set, and an easel stage right to display the titles and numbers of each scene. The three-strong cast of Scott Smith (Woyzeck), Kerry Frampton (Marie) and Mal Smith (Drum Major) are confident and welcoming, and you know you are in for a treat.
Based on true events, the play tells the story of Woyzeck: an impoverished soldier who agrees to be amateur barber to his captain and a ginea-pig for medical experiements in order to support his girlfriend (Marie) and their child. Overwraught and paranoid, Woyzeck begins to hear voices, and when he learns Marie has betrayed him through an affair with the Drum Major, murders her.
With a strong mix of comedy, mime, and music, Splendid Productions’ excellent actors disect the story, beginning with the murder then working their way through the causes for it. Multifaceted, hilarious moments such as the song in ‘Scene 12 - Stab the Bitch Dead’, which the audience joins in with, take a more sinister turn as Woyzeck responds: “Alright, I will”, leaving us to realise we represent the voices in his head and have just set him on his murderous mission.
The mime elements of the show are particularly strong, and beautifully understated. There is comic gold in ‘Scene 14 – A Fight’, when the Drum Major completes Woyzeck’s total humiliation by beating him up. It is presented through mime, movement and sound, with each punch, kick and groan orchestrated – simply superb slapstick!
In addition to the comedy and amazing physicality of the performance, at the core is really good acting. Woyzeck is presented as a sympathetic sort of killer; a man who thinks far too much, and is overwhelmed by the world. Marie, worn down by his morbid philosophising, is drawn to the confident, pompous Drum Major, a man who can offer her an escape from her dreary existance. Woyzeck’s heartfelt sorrow in ‘Scene 8: No She Wouldn’t, Yes She Did’ is palpable, and Marie’s emotive line “I would rather a knife in my body than your hand on mine” both crushes him further and foreshadows her death.
All in all this is an exceptional show - bold, accessible and entertaining. Mal Smith, in the dual role of Director and Actor, is a pleasure to watch; and both Scott Smith and Kerry Frampton showcase their obvious talent and passion. I await the company’s next production of Faustus with baited breath.
Review by Chris Hislop
Woyzeck is one of those dark Gothic plays that exemplifies 19th century German literature: a horrid tale of broken dreams and madness, high drama in the gutter. This ambitious re-telling, performed with style and verve by Splendid Productions, takes this Gothic nightmare and transforms it into a modern farce, with flashes of the original piece shining through. The actors leave you delightfully teetering between humour and horror, and the simple and minimalist staging only adds to their strange world. A better choice of play would make this show a little less awkward, but Woyzeck is still well worth a look.
The story of Woyzeck is of a soldier returning to his sweetheart from the front. It turns on its head the traditional tableau by making the soldier a disease-ridden medical subject, and his sweetheart a penniless beggarwoman. Woyzeck (the soldier) murders her for sleeping with another man, claiming that the voices in his head made him do it, and we are left unsure whether his madness came from his medical tests, or whether he was always insane.
This inventive production managed to find comedy in the above, with the three actors slipping into a variety of roles, and using and abusing their many, many musical instruments to create a truly vibrant and energetic set. Much of their production was based around the actual writing of Woyzeck: Buchner died halfway through, and the play was reconstructed from scenes found on his desk. In this vein, this production bounced back and forth along the story-line, showing the disjointed effort to understand Woyzeck's character, and indulging the audience in his madness. This was the least best realised aspect of the production: there were too many seperate scenes, and what started off as jumping around ended up being a straight run-thru minus the scenes done earlier. If it had been a little more adventurous, this would have been truly exciting. As such, it was a great idea that needed more development.
However, this is one of my few direct criticisms. Most other aspects of the show were stellar, with the episodic nature of the scenes highlighting the various company members' talents, and talented they most certainly are. The music numbers were interesting and fun, especially the 'Stab the Bitch Dead' piece, where the audience was encouraged to sing along and then became the voices in Woyzeck's head, encouraging him to murder his sweetheart: we suddenly all felt horrifyingly complicit, this was a really excellent conceit. The piece was well-performed across the board, with special mention going to Scott Smith for his portrayal of Woyzeck. A simple movement to get him in and out of character worked a charm, and it was clear how hard he was working: the sweat flowing off him was certainly a good indication!
This show deserves a lot of credit for being as slick and enjoyable as it is. The material did not lend itself directly to a humourous interpretation, but the actors still managed to create a darkly comic piece out of it. The tone felt slightly off, and some of the jokes were set up to be in low taste and ended up just being unneccessarily awkward. Some different material, or maybe a little more tact in portraying it, would have fit the acting style better, and made the piece better for it. Nonetheless, their efforts with this material do show their talents, and Splendid Productions are certainly ones to look out for.
Woyzeck, Blake Theatre, Monmouth
Review by Nigel Jarrett
from The South Wales Argus 2 February 2009
It’s almost impossible for a theatre company not to put its personal stamp on Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, his play about a hapless soldier out of joint with the world.
Originally conceived as a series of short scenes and bequeathed to posterity in 1837 as a fragment when Buchner died of typhoid at 23, the invitation to personal rendition is almost built in.
But any liberties taken, such as shuffling the scenes before presentation and even repeating them – in this case, Woyzeck’s brutal murder of his common-law wife Marie is performed more than once – are invariably acts of homage to the originator of expressionist drama.
Woyzeck does not evolve like a traditional play. It is a cinematic mixture of events, though lacking traditional cinema’s rigid and commercial dependence on a beginning, a middle and an end.
In this production the scenes are announced on cards in music-hall fashion and the cast of three (Scott Smith in the lead role, Alasdair Shanks and Kerry Frampton), playing eight characters with bravura, convey the double whammy of being irrational in a crazy world.
London-based Splendid, which specialises in political theatre aimed at young people, give it their all under directors Mal Smith and Lucy Cuthbertson, acting in the spirit as well as the literal sense of both the events depicted and their moral implications.
They use minimal props creatively and there is exactly the right degree of momentum and interaction with the audience.
Strolling players at a brisk pace, as it were.
The Good Woman of Szechuan
Review by Richard Coe
from Teaching Drama Summer Term 1 2008 (courtesy of Rhinegold Publishing Ltd)
It is always an exciting time for my students and me when artistic director Kerry Frampton and her team from Splendid Productions announce a new touring production. This year it was back to Brecht with an adaptation of his epic play The Good Woman of Szechuan. In a time of greed and selfishness, three gods are sent down from heaven to find a single genuinely good person to prove that humanity is worth saving. In the run-down outskirts of the town of Szechuan they encounter Shen-Te, a prostitute who provides them with a room for the night. As a reward for her compassion, the three gods give her one thousand silver dollars with the understanding that she must sustain goodness and charity in every aspect of her life from now on.
Is it possible to live a good life in a corrupt world? Does money bring happiness? Do people always do the right thing, no matter the circumstances? Can you be truly good without being split in two? These are the questions the play is asking and they constitute fantastic starting points for students looking into the devising process, as they are instantly recognisable and relevant themes to young people.
As ever with Splendid Productions, the play began with a tongue-in-cheek song and dance number – in one flash, students were laughing and clapping, enthralled by the immediacy and energy of the performance. All three performers sang heartily and the prominent use of gestus helped to mark each moment with great clarity, but not without adding a little question mark. This is the great thing about this theatre company: we are never completely sure whose side they are on – how Brecht would have cheered!
Interestingly, Splendid have done away with the traditional use of titles foreshadowing events, which Brecht used so widely and replaced them with questions, for example ‘how far would you go to protect what’s yours?’ Taking the distancing argument to a new level, this was a terrific device; I felt involved but objective at the same time. I hope this effect reached my students, too, as I always try to explain to them that Brecht did not want an audience to just passively consume what was being performed for them. If your students struggle with the Verfremdungseffekt, it is a good idea to see this production. The actors use narration to move the story as they simultaneously dress into a new role. They then come out of role to question whether the audience understood what happened in the previous scene. Kerry Frampton uses puppets to great effect to play three very different gods, while her colleague Rosie McKay (new to the company and a physical theatre practitioner) makes extensive use of gestus.
Shen-Te’s struggle to maintain integrity in the face of corruption and hardship is compelling drama, if not a riveting story, and Kerry Frampton and her partner Ben Hales have worked hard to keep the play contemporary and relevant. The actors’ performances were nothing short of outstanding, but there was also a problem with this production: despite the actors’ skill to easily slip into different roles, the audience sometimes struggled to keep track of who is playing who. It was a case, I felt, of actors playing several roles out of necessity rather than deliberation. At this point, you may have wondered if the play might be just too big for this talented trio. However, in the end, we felt that we had seen an inspiring performance of a rather uninspiring play. As Splendid Productions remains a brilliant touring theatre company, they manage to create amazing theatre regardless of material.
Ideas generated by the play were later explored in a wonderful workshop led by actor Rob Vesty. Students were given newspaper articles and had to create a piece of theatre based on the theory of the street accident: the idea it is to tell a story from an outsider’s point of view rather than from a protagonist’s point of view, doing so with varying attitudes (for example scornful, compassionate, indifferent). Students were encouraged to use sound effects, slow motion, rewind and thought-tracking to keep the play lively. They created fantastic work, which was dynamic, powerful and slick.
In their series ‘Practitioners in Performance’, Splendid Productions offer workshop programmes on Artaud, Berkoff, Boal, Brecht, Brook, Craig, Godber, Grotowski and Stanislavski. Other workshops offered by the company deal with devising and performance skills, text, and advanced physical theatre, which is taught by Rosie McKay, who uses the techniques of Grotowski and Feldenkrais.
Kerry Frampton has given workshops in my school on devising theatre using Complicite and Berkoff techniques. She listens intently and uses her enthusiasm for both theatre and young people to take their work to a higher level. Students were also very impressed with Rosie McKay’s work and kept experimenting weeks after she had gone. In short, Splendid Productions are a theatre group for young people. They are passionate and highly skilled drama educators with a wide range of workshops available. Please do get them into your school – you won’t regret it.
Richard Coe has been head of drama and performance across the curriculum at Rochester Grammar School since 2003. He is lead practitioner in presentation skills and teacher assertion. He has been a teacher for seven years.
Antigone
Can classical works of drama engage and grip a young, modern
audience? Richard Coe lets Splendid Productions into his school
to deliver a performance and workshop on Brecht’s Antigone
from Teaching Drama Summer Term 1 2007 (courtesy of Rhinegold Publishing Ltd.)
I first came across Splendid Productions when they toured with their version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which has been recently resurrected for the National Theatre South Bank Festival, and was immediately struck by their professionalism, energy and love for theatre. After watching their latest production of Antigone and observing them for an after-show workshop I felt compelled to spread the word. The company arrive with no pretension. Unlike other companies I have used in the past, Splendid settle in without fuss or fanfare, encouraging students to watch them setting out the stage and getting props, costume and technical equipment ready, talking to them as they do so.
Mal Smith, actor and adapter of the piece, begins the workshop by stating his intention clearly to take a classic ‘boring’ Greek play and translate it into something relevant, dynamic and political in a modern sense. In fact, the piece came from a residency Smith did in Oldham with students who helped research and structure the first performances. The production opens with a cheesy, lively song, written by Ben Hales, and a dance number, which plays on the students’ fears of Antigone being ‘a boring old tragedy’. By using this device, the group immediately get their audience laughing and feeling comfortable as well as setting the tone for the rest of the play; this will be no ordinary Greek tragedy. This introduction was a hit with my Year 13 students in particular; having watched the piece at the start of their devising process for Edexcel Unit 4, they all used song and dance to begin their own work. The songs were studied for their self-referential quality, creating a Verfremdungseffekt, and their impact on the audience.
Next up was the idea of choice, which I felt was a vital component in the group’s production. Brecht focuses closely on the choices that characters will make and, ultimately, this should influence the choices the audience make about how to live their lives.
So how did Splendid’s production of Antigone highlight this concept? First of all the main characters are portrayed as archetypes. At the start of the play, using video projection, Antigone and Creon are introduced with a list of archetypal qualities that are in conflict with one another. For example, Splendid Productions repeat scene 4, where Antigone and Creon discuss their actions, immediately to show two completely different points of view on Antigone’s archetypal qualities. In the first interpretation, Kerry from Splendid underplays Antigone; she makes little eye contact, and is still and frightened by the strength of Creon. The audience are made to feel for her plight. In the repetition, Kerry becomes ‘mighty Antigone’, using a repeated gestus, which signifies her defiance and strength of will. To further illustrate these conflicting interpretations of the same fragment of dialogue, the lines ‘I did not think your decree strong enough to overrule the unwritten, unchangeable laws of God and Heaven. Of course I knew that I would have to die’, were played with tears in the eyes in the initial rendering and then shouted in defiance in the repeated scene. Thus, as an audience our sympathies and understandings of an individual’s actions are questioned and judged. My Year 13 group seemed highly influenced by this for their devised theatre work, choosing to concentrate on environmental issues from various viewpoints. In making the usual villains become heroes and vice versa, our perceptions and prejudices were challenged.
No one escapes Splendid’s satirical impulses in this production. Antigone is a character the group have empathy with, but the actors challenge her constant use of God as an excuse for her actions. Scene 8 is introduced as ‘God and government working together’ but turns out to be a song called ‘God made me do it’. Guess whom the actors are portraying here? Yes indeed, the song satirises the dealings of Bush, Blair and Saddam Hussein. While this scene is funny, particularly because of Mal Smith’s brilliant Tony Blair impression, it does raise a valid and interesting point. Who dictates what is right and wrong and how do we make these decisions?
These workshops were expertly delivered by all members of the group. On top of that, Splendid Productions produce fantastic teaching materials for all of their productions. I would recommend them wholeheartedly for their great work, superb attitude and, above all, passion for theatre.
Richard Coe, Head of Drama, Rochester Grammar School for Girls
