Last of my three preparations for the ROH production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck next week (the Met production, the ROH insight film and this play). In 2011 BBC Radio Three presented George Büchner's unfinished play from 1837 detailing the life and death of Franz Woyzeck (Berg misread the original name), a soldier in a provincial German town, who, bullied and mistreated, suffers delusions, murdering Marie, his common law wife and mother of his son, and then drowns trying to hide the murder weapon. The play has more or less the same plot and details as the opera. Büchner (1813-1837) was a scientist, and wrote the play based partly on his research into mental health and the nervous system. It is a psycho-drama on suffering, with the common man, represented by Woyzeck, at the heart if it, and argues forcibly that our lives are determined by social circumstance. The play, which was not performed until the early twentieth century, is now recognised as a major work, and as well as Berg's operatic adaption it is also the subject of a 1979 film by Werner Herzog. Büchner died in Zurich of typhoid at the age of only 23, having had to flee Germany in 1834 on account of his revolutionary ideas. He was charged with treason when he published a pamphlet critical of social injustice in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. He managed to escape, although his collaborator, evangelical theologian Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, was arrested, tortured and died in prison.

First broadcast February 2011. Translated by Gregory Motton. Cast: Lee Ingleby, Deborah McAndrew, Derek Riddell, Gerard Fletcher, Becky Hindley, Rob Pickavance, Jonathan Keeble, and Perveen Hamilton. Original Music by Tom Lingard. Produced by Gary Brown.