A man on the margins of society, driven by need, love and madness: Woyzeck shows man as an experimental arrangement - unsparing, poetic and infused with dark beauty by Tom Waits' music.

A man as an experiment: Woyzeck rushes from one job to the next to keep his family afloat. He shaves officers, serves as a soldier and makes his body available for dubious medical experiments. Poverty, duty and humiliation force him into a life without respite. The doctor treats him like an object of study, society like a tool. When Marie, his only support, turns to the drum major, Woyzeck's fragile world finally collapses. What remains is a man trapped between fear, dependence and despair - until violence becomes the last resort.

Georg Büchner's fragmentary drama meets the music of Tom Waits - sometimes raw and angry, sometimes tender and melancholy. Together with Kathleen Brennan and director Robert Wilson, Waits transformed the play into a fatalistic and beautiful piece of music theater, which premiered in Copenhagen in 2000.

In Mille Maria Dalsgaard's production, the focus is on the human being as an object of research - at the mercy of the army, poverty and medicine, of mechanisms that tear the individual apart. The music becomes an inner echo of this world: it pulsates, defies, breaks open - as an expression of a longing that does not fall silent despite everything.
Premiere February 20
Further performance: May 31, 2026