Franz & Marie review: Woyzeck folk musical sings through the horror

A folk musical built from 27 songs has turned Georg Büchner's unfinished tragedy Woyzeck into Franz & Marie, now playing at the Charing Cross Theatre in London. The show, reviewed by the Guardian, finds genuine emotional heart amid the source material's stark terror, even if its songs occasionally defuse the horror.

Where does the story come from?

Büchner died in 1837, aged 23, leaving Woyzeck as a loose bundle of papers. Editors have ordered and reordered those pages for nearly two centuries, and the chemical treatments once used to decipher the playwright's handwriting actually discoloured them. What survives is jagged: roughly two dozen scenes plus a handful of fragments.

The production mirrors that damage in its design. Stained pieces of cloth — a similar number to Büchner's scenes — are stitched into the stage curtains, and the 27 folk songs thread the story together. The form of the show matches the form of the text: patched, fragmentary, assembled after the fact.

What changes for Franz and Marie?

The plot still tracks Franz Woyzeck, a desperate soldier sinking into madness and growing suspicious of his partner. But the musical's first-name title signals its real shift: it wants to understand both characters, not just document Franz's collapse.

Büchner's Woyzeck suffers visions and hallucinations. Here they're joined by traumatic battlefield flashbacks. Marie admiringly calls Franz a war hero — a backstory Büchner never gave his downtrodden squaddie.

That change ripples outward. It suggests Marie sees a trace of Franz's former vigour in the drum major, here named Varg, who brazenly pursues her. In Büchner's play, the pursuit leads to an affair. In the musical, Marie fights off Varg when he attempts to rape her, and it's the rumours of infidelity — not the act — that accelerate Franz's frenzy.

The rework gives Marie agency and makes the tragedy hinge on gossip rather than betrayal. Whether that softens Büchner's bleakness or sharpens it is the tension running through the whole evening: the Guardian's reviewer found the songs "enchanting and stirring" while noting they occasionally blunt the play's stark terror.

For a 190-year-old fragment that has resisted every attempt at a definitive text, the result suggests Woyzeck still works as raw material — and that folk song may be as honest a vessel for it as any edited script.