When the Old Vic announced that Jack Thorne would be writing an adaptation of
Woyzeck and John Boyega would star I did wonder if the combination of a
Harry Potter writer and a
Star Wars actor would draw an audience unprepared for a play people have famously struggled to get to the bottom of for over a century. As it turns out I
really hope there aren't too many kids being taken along as they'll have come away from the evening with a whole new vocabulary. Georg Büchner's play was unfinished when the playwright died in 1837, so all versions have always taken a bit of leeway in filling in the gaps. Thorne's version moves the action to 1980s West Berlin, where Boyega plays Frank Woyzeck, part of the British army presence patrolling the Berlin Wall. It's a job both stressful and dull, and those stationed there are thought of as inferior to those in the thick of it in Northern Ireland.
