On March 24, 2015 a Germanwings plane bearing the fateful flight number 9525 departed Barcelona airport and perished with 150 people in the Alps on the way to Düsseldorf. In this play Antanas Obcarskas and Laurynas Adomaitis endorse an expanded idea of authorship and reimagine the well known Georg Büchner’s story of Woyzeck through the tragedy that bears the face of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
The real, historic Woyzeck (his name was Johann Christian) was a barber-soldier who killed the mother of his son with a knife. On that fateful day, Woyzeck grabbed a knife, but the present has more powerful tools for the modern woyzecks, whose poverty continues to persevere among us and in us. Numerous woyzecks are still shaving their captains, eating “healthful” food prescribed to them, tormenting their beloveds, although they are merely slaves to their desires. A knife, a pistol, a steering-wheel, a sniper rifle, an atomic bomb may fall into the hands of a banal jaded Woyzeck feeling the need to prove his authenticity at any cost in face of established normalcy of today.
The most common daily routine of a normal person can become a deadly threat. The documentary reality of Andreas Lubitz and his scattered aircraft bears memory of the first flight and the first fall of Icarus. Today Woyzeck as well as Lubitz disastrously strives to endure despite the crushing grip of total administration continuing from generation to generation, from system to system.
The characters and language used in the play conform to some ideas expressed by Herbert Marcuse in his “One-Dimensional Man” (1964), especially those concerning speech in administrative context. Airports and aircrafts are places where speech is regulated the most. Both passengers and, especially, employees must follow norms in their everyday speech. Thus any transgression which would be neglectible anywhere else becomes an expression of individuality.
The characters, much like in the original Woyzeck, are mundane and anti-heroic. The drama is pesky and the setting is bleek and sterile. However, the authors have added a layer of self-awareness to Woyzeck’s character that has turned the whole thing on its head. Now Woyzeck knows that he’s mediocre (that he’s a “woyzeck”) but cannot fully accept it. In search of his authenticity he becomes the deadly tool and most flawed part of the aircraft whose ambition drew him too close to the sun. A dark and obscure drama sees a very sane and normal Woyzeck of today standing at an airport terminal where any mistake is critical and “the need” of normalcy is absolute. Boarding has just begun to Germanwings flight Nо. 9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.
Georg Büchner is considered one of the most talented and progressive playwrights in Germany. His plays have long been established in the classical repertoire. Despite his premature death, Büchner left a very deep imprint in German culture and theater dramaturgy. The most important literary award in Germany (Georg-Büchner-Preis) is named after George Buchner. Woyzeck is perhaps the most significant play of the author. The narrative of the play is based on historical material, i.e. a real-life story, and although the play is incomplete and fragmented, the story told is a timeless expose of a dehumanized person’s situation. The creators of the performance at LNDT chose a conceptual approach to the text (translation) of the play, and based their narrative on the story of the pilot Andreas Lubitz of Germanwings.
