Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator

It is comparatively easy to set up a basic model for epic theater. For practical experiments I usually picked as my example of completely simple, "natural" epic theater an incident such as can be seen at any street corner: an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.

— Brecht 1964, 121 (emphasis added)

Introducing the Witness

By which analytical strategies can the specific and distinctive features of theatrical performances and performance events—what we usually refer to as their "theatricality"—be most fruitfully examined and analyzed? How can these features be isolated from the other features of such an event? This is no doubt a classical formalist or structuralist question—in line with the attempts to define the literary or aesthetic qualities of a verbal text, what the Russian Formalists termed its "literariness"—and it has in one way or another been the point of departure for most of the existing semiotic approaches to theater and performance studies as they developed, in particular during the 1980s. My aim here is to re-examine this issue on the basis of the notion of "witnessing" as a device used in performances, through which the spectator is "invited" to view the particular performance. I will argue that the notion of witnessing can serve as one (but certainly not the only) point of departure for understanding theatricality, enabling us to understand what makes a certain event theatrical. An examination and analysis of this notion will also enable us to establish an empirical basis for this specific aspect of theatricality. Furthermore, it is my hope that the analytical strategies introduced and employed here will confront the crisis, which the semiotic approaches to theater and performance have been grappling with for more than a decade, introducing a moral as well as an ideological perspective into the seemingly neutral arena of the theory of signs.

One of the defining characteristics of a theatrical event is the fact that it takes place in the presence of spectators, in front of a live audience. What I wish to show here is that this basic situation, of a spectator watching a performance, is frequently doubled in drama as well as in performance practice by situating an additional spectator, a witness, on the stage. This witness is part of the fictional world of the performance and the witness serves as a mirror image, a kind of filter or lens, or focalizer for the real spectators watching the performance. I wish to draw attention to the fact that the activity of the spectators watching a performance is frequently doubled on the stage, within the performance itself, creating a fictional / theatrical mirror-situation of watching and viewing for the spectators in the auditorium. Someone on the stage is watching what the other characters are doing while the spectators in turn are looking at this event as well as following how the witness or witnesses on the stage are reacting. The spectators are thus not only watching a certain event on the stage; they are also looking at someone on the stage witnessing this event.

After introducing some of the theoretical implications of this specific approach to theatricality, I want to examine the shaving-scene in three fairly recent productions of George Büchner's Woyzeck. This is a quite straightforward scene, which according to the drama-text does not need anybody else on the stage besides Woyzeck shaving the Officer and the Officer who is getting shaved. Different constellations of watching, viewing, eavesdropping or witnessing do however not only exist on the stage during the performance itself, but have frequently been inscribed in the dramatic text itself as well. In the three performances I will examine here, however, different forms of witnessing have been integrated in the mise-en-scène of the performance without such a textual basis. Examining scenes where witnesses have been added on the stage where this is not necessary, at least not in...