WOYZECK

Set and Costume Design

Writer Jack Thorne from an original work by Georg Buchner

Director Zana Hoxha

Set and Costume Designer
Grace Rumsey

Production Photographer Rirlind Beqa

"Georg Buchner's play Woyzeck is one of the most performed and influential plays in German theatre. Based on a real-life murder trial that took place in Germany in the 1820s, the play was written in 1837, but left incomplete at the author's death from typhus in February that year. It was not staged until 1913, when it was premiered in Munich. There is ongoing debate regarding the extent to which the surviving text is complete, and the intended order of the scenes.

This version by playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne relocates the action to Berlin at the height of the Cold War. It was premiered at The Old Vic, London, on 15 May 2017.

In Thorne's version, Woyzeck is a British soldier stationed in Berlin with his girlfriend Marie and baby daughter. Together they are trying to build a future for their child, but in attempting to escape the poverty that entraps them, they come up against hypocrisy, lust, cruelty, and the dangerous fissures in Woyzeck's own past."

This was designed for the 'end-on' proscenium Sainsbury Theatre in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. It was further adapted to be put on in Theatre 'Hadi Shehu' in Gjakova, Kosovo, where it premiered in February 2025.