Naima Khan talks to Adrian Kohler about Woyzeck on the Highveld and its performances at The Barbican.
“Capitalists still run the country,” says Adrian Kohler, “but there are now more black capitalists.” The co-founder of Handspring Puppet Company is telling me how South Africa has changed since the premiere of his show, Woyzeck on the Highveld. This story of a man pushed to his limits by an oppressive system has been around for a good nineteen years. Its inspiration, George Buchner's Woyzeck, has been around for 156 years longer than that and comes to the Barbican this week.
With its ageless theme exploring the mindset of “a man at the bottom of a heap” as Adrian puts it, Woyzeck on the Highveld transports Buchner's nineteenth century soldier to apartheid South Africa where he works as a servant. “Woyzeck and his superiors,” continues Kohler, “are still to be found. In fact they're to be found anywhere in the world. In that sense, the show has become less South African.”
Designed with William Kentridge, the show's style and form have their advantages when exploring the themes at hand. “William’s charcoal drawings are pretty impressionist,” says Kohler, “and I was keen to create rough figures, but I didn’t know if I had the carving technique. William was the one who pushed me. He was incredibly instrumental in that.” Kentridge's art work forms the black and white video animation which works in conjunction with the music to create the ominous mood required for a show inevitably shrouded in tragedy.
The life-size puppets themselves highlight much of what Woyzeck says via the distilled dialogue of this production. He is steered in various disastrous directions by circumstance and power games, while he is perpetually and blatantly manipulated by puppeteers. What's more, Kohler and Kentridge have found a way to shift the apartheid focus away from their design and into the imagination of their audience. Rather than determine the race of their characters, they've left the faces of the puppets unpainted so they're all the same colour of raw wood. “When you paint racial or ethnic differences,” Kohler elaborates, “all you see is a layer of paint, so the expressionistic style of the figures and the lack of paint were two very liberating things for me. It means that in the context of Woyzeck on the Highveld the audience have to supply these aspects with their own imagination.”
“Generally,” Adrian says, “puppets work best during the silence, on either side of the words.” Handspring are globally acknowledged as masters of puppetry, and that one point reminds me why.
Woyzeck on the Highveld runs at The Barbican from 6th September.
Click here for more Fringe Theatre in London
Click here for Theatre in London
Click here for Things to do in London
Add an event
Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...