Schubert and Büchner fuse to make an absorbing hundred minutes of theatre

This is a marriage between two masterpieces of Germanic culture, created a decade apart in total ignorance of each other: Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise, written in Vienna in 1827, and Büchner’s play Woyzeck, written in Zurich around 1835.

For this summer’s Galway International Arts Festival, the Irish director Conall Morrison devised a version of the play that integrates extracts from Winterreise,  with Wilhelm Müller’s verse freely and skillfully translated into English by the late Stephen Clark. Woyzeck – the Musical, as it might brashly be headlined, has now travelled to the Barbican (before returning to Ireland for next month’s Dublin Theatre Festival) and it proves to be a richly impressive piece of creative appropriation.

At his premature death, Büchner left his sketches for the play in a fragmentary state, without any clear sense of the order he intended them to be played. Those who know the story through Berg’s operatic version will be surprised at the way Morrison chooses to present the succession of events, and Schubert’s music is also freely cut and pasted between the different characters out of its original order. The piece opens, to give a striking instance, not with Woyzeck shaving the Doctor, but with Winterreise’s eerie conclusion – the lament of a hurdy-gurdy man, rather wonderfully sung by the androgynous contralto of Rosaleen Linehan.