WoyUbian Whiplash

Last Saturday I sat on the Woyzeck side of the show. As I had expected the
the Ubu projections served the Woyzeck play by appearing to be the character Woyzeck's hallucinations. What I didn't anticipate was how jarring the process would be: how over the course of the performance the feeling grew that I was not only wrenched back and forth between two plays but between two mutually exclusive world views. Until I began to hate Woyzeck - because he increasingly personified hopelessness, greyness, death. The Ubu visions burst in defying his relentless life, but he didn't learn anarchic joy from them, instead he found a road to murder. His side crushed life.

I was glad to see him go through the wall and away. But then the Ubuites came out through that same wall, popping into existence right there in front of me. And suddenly, what had been brash and funny, was horrible. They were horrible. They no longer represented life but were voyeuristic, vampiric consumers of other people and their painful lives. They were on the side of the evil dead, and the poor Woyzeck, now staring out of the projection, was the only thing worth nurturing. Whiplash!!!!