Petty Men

“In Adult Film's adaptation of Georg Büchner's unfinished 1836 play, WOYZECK, an accordion is a human baby and a crosshatched light fixture, a coursing, hazardous river. Josh Barilla’s production design is among the most creative and efficient I’ve seen. Staged at Ridgewood's Sweater Factory—the site of a literal former sweater factory—no set piece goes unused, and no square inch, unpopulated. There is the lighting, which dims and fluoresces above the audience, simulating a brutal, post-industrial nightmare. There is also the music, traditionally folkish but in this case, ceded cleverly by interludes of female grunge and alternative rock (PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) to march in step with the misogyny and violence endured by the female characters. WOYZECK, in short, is about a poor soldier (Ryan Czerwonko)—forced to subsist on peas as the subject of cruel experiments—who kills his mistress, Marie (Madeline Bernhard) after a stretch of jealous contemplation. Czerwonko and Bernhard are precise, striking, and perfectly neurotic in their performances. Had they just been a touch more or less unhinged, it would have been an entirely different, and probably worse, play. In the sway between weird and eerie, Adult Film’s WOYZECK toggles both. “Sometimes the world goes so black your eyes are no use […] And you’re afraid that it will turn into a spiderweb. What you’re touching,” as Woyzeck says in the play, “That’s when you get yes and no at the same time.””

“Viewers are advised to prepare to abandon any preconceptions that they may have about an opera based on Wilde’s classic. Gerald Barry’s adaptation takes a looking glass to Wilde’s text, warping and distorting the text into a surrealist fever dream. Francis O’Connor’s set establishes the mood, with a snaking chez longues that undulates across the stage before disappearing into the pit at the front of the stage. A grand piano looms in the background, the legs and piano stool perched atop inconceivably long legs, reminiscent of Dali’s Temptation of St Anthony. Alongside the set, the costume design from Hannah Wolfe deepens the sense of the uncanny and the unexpected, particularly as a foil to the set design – crisp, clean clothing is undone by soil and water, deconstructing any sense of the pristine alongside the syncopations of the score which vibrates throughout with a staccato to match the reduction of Wilde’s language to an operatic form. Elements of the refined remain, with legato themes appearing briefly within the background throughout. Enormous credit to Henry Waddington, whose Lady Bracknell reigns supreme with a detached deadpan air that is a perfect foil not only to his outrageous costume design, a latex black cloak and plumed helmet through act two, but also to the chaos playing out onstage. This is opera as you could not possibly imagine it, and Barry has said of his adaptation that he took inspiration from Wilde’s own statement that “we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things in life with a sincere and studied triviality”. There were elements of the show that drifted perhaps too far into the conceptual and left an impression of superfluousness, and, indeed, moments of sonic discord that Lady Bracknell summed up in a line from act two, “what is that terrible sound”. However, the overall effect of the piece is one that challenges convention in a farcical, nonsensical sort of way that makes for a truly unexpected evening. Were it not for the heatwave, the entire audience would have been in evening dress, which would have added an additional layer to the fun that Wilde so often poked at the upper orders of English society, and which this opera succeeds in doing as heir to that tradition. Beyond the opera itself, an afternoon and evening at Garsington is a novel and charming experience, and it is hugely exciting to see a traditionally serious form being challenged in such a way at one of the great arenas of the English country house opera tradition.”

“The Old Vic production was performed in the round, on a revolve, the lines of the stage floor moving in opposing directions mimicking the rotation of ancient puzzle maps that might reveal some hidden astrological pathway. The staging felt understated, elegant, and utterly absorbing, evoking the cosmic magic of the theories aired within the text. The show is worth seeing for the chemistry and performances from Isis Hainsworth and Seamus Dillane alone, they are remarkable – utterly compelling, coy, and charismatic performances that carried the play off the page. What awaits is a show that handles complicated topics with dexterity, dynamism, and joy.”