Woyzeck premiered on stage in 1913 at the Munich Residenz Theater, nearly a century after playwright Georg Büchner's death. Critics responded favorably to the production, which has become a classic. From the 1960s to today, Woyzeck has recieved countless English language revivals on major stages in New York and London, not to mention a myriad of German language performances in Europe.
Recent notable productions of Woyzeck have taken advantage of the director's prerogative for creativity with the fragmentary nature of the piece with resulting productions moving far afield from the original and yet capturing the essential spirit of Büchner's script. The Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa's Woyzeck on the Highveld played at the Public Theater in 1994. In this puppet theater and multi-media adaptation, Woyzeck is a black South African servant enduring injustice during Apartheid.
The Worth Street Theater Company presented an adaptation of Woyzeck called Woah-Jack! in 1999. The adaptation was written and directed by Jeff Cohen, and re-imagined Woyzeck as a black American soldier at an army base in the 1960s. Cohen chose to rewrite Marie's murder as a suicide and Woyzeck's suicide as a lynch-mob murder, thus drastically undercutting some major strengths of these characters. In the original play, Woyzeck is rendered as one of the theater's most compelling anti-heroes, but by muting the climactic actions of the piece to serve his historical agenda external to the original script, Cohen takes all agency away from Woyzeck and turns him into the pathetic figure of a simple victim. Cohen even deprives Woyzeck of the possible redemption of his own suicide in favor of the racially charged symbol of a lynching.
Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and Kathleen Brennan created a production of Woyzeck in Denmark in 2000 that traveled to New York in 2002. Wilson and Büchner are a good match for each other, as they are both working closer to the tradition of Gordon Craig's Übermarionette or German Tanztheater than realist, method-acted sitting-room dramas and have, therefore, created characters developed through formal design techniques and writing techniques intended not to produce a one-dimensional feeling of sympathy in an audience but rather designed to create a portrayal of general universal emotion.
In 2006 the Gate Theater of London brought Woyzeck to St. Ann's Warehouse in New York. The production was adapted and directed by Daniel Kramer. The production used music by Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, and Beethoven throughout as background music but was staged as a period piece set in the 1800s.
Woyzeck's production history illustrates the myriad of interpretations to which the play has been subjected over the past century. The wide range of versions is likely due to the fragmentary and unfinished nature of the piece, which attracts many directors. However, Woyzeck continues to command attention because of the strength of Büchner's writing. Ahead of its time, Woyzeck speaks to the modern sensibility of an increasingly fragmented life. This AR Woyzeck project does not attempt to present itself as the definitive version of Büchner's original, rather the hope is that this project will contribute yet another piece to the collage that is Woyzeck that has been growing over the past century.