About Murder Song
Monday 24th March 2025
Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck is a rich text, a partly completed play which is so perennially fascinating that it encourages adaptation, and revision, and re-vision. Director Dan Horrigan is the latest creative to be putting together a compendium adapted, appropriated and inspired by it. Under the sign of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, he is planning an art work made up of poetry, spoken word, song and film. His latest short films include the hypnotic Never Your Hand in Mine, and Murder Song. He describes his process like this:
“A few years ago, I directed Normal by Anthony Neilson with Luca Matteo Zizarri at The Roundhouse studio in Camden. The play is heavily indebted to Woyzeck — both in its questioning of the insanity plea and in the fact that Woyzeck is arguably a play that presents a case for criminal insanity and diminished responsibility — in both structure and theme. Woyzeck is a play that makes the case for poverty catalysing tragedy and directing Normal keyed me in to how much Woyzeck makes possible.
“New adaptations/appropriations of Woyzeck in digital form help reverse the play’s potential recuperation and create new opportunities for its radical message. It keeps the drama alive as well as its ideas. It means those who don’t go to the theatre can engage with its potential. Büchner was an exile for publishing anti-bourgeois pamphlets encouraging the working class to revolt. His friends were tortured to death for it and he lived in fear of persecution.
“To me, Woyzeck was his continuation of this agenda. He was pessimistic about the possibility of revolt within his own community, but he still wrote about it. He could circumvent low levels of literacy through theatre and detonate ideas in the cultural zone — reaching influential people who could shift the dial closer to a fairer distribution of rights and capital. A new play for new freedoms. Of course, this never happened in his lifetime.
“In Murder Song, I present a narrow but focused take on psychosis. It’s one line of flight. Often, those in the grip of mental anguish blame those they love the most. Marie appears in various guises: betrayer, mother, adoring partner, carer, object of desire, tormentor, hallucination, bride, and others too. Victim finally. Marie is a complex character — the emotions that drive her are understandable. What is denied her is the call to action of the play.”
Murder Song stars regular collaborators Nicholas Anscombe and Nathalia Campbell Smith, with Fraser Watson’s cinematography for Covert Firmament. Büchner’s Woyzeck is a drama of revolt, one which argues that poverty catalyses tragedy. Horrigan’s work pounces on this source and revivifies it for our contemporary world.
© Aleks Sierz
