Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck is a play that has fascinated many. It seems to be the first work of modern drama, although that is principally because it exists only in fragmentary form, incomplete at Büchner’s death in 1837, aged 23. I have seen a number of powerful productions of it, but none that has married that power to a sense of coherence. Until now, that is, and paradoxically this greater focus comes from mashing the play up with its near-contemporary song cycle (also unfinished, also by a creator who died young), Schubert’s Winterreise.

Military barber Franz Woyzeck, nowhere near as sharp as his razor, is further mentally destabilised by the platoon doctor’s use of him as an all-purpose experimental guinea-pig; when his lover Marie falls fleetingly for a drum-major, Woyzeck feels he has no alternative but to stab her to death. (After this point the surviving playscript peters out.) Adapter/director Conall Morrison punctuates the scenes with Schubert’s Lieder, offering sometimes literal, sometimes figurative insight into the states of mind of Woyzeck and other characters, most tellingly adding depth to the portrayal of Marie. Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan is thus far a middling actor, but few can sell a song with such intensity, be it by Nick Cave or, as here, by Schubert with lyrics in a new translation by the late Stephen Clark which is as stark as the January landscape.

O’Sullivan is the only singer-who-acts in a cast otherwise composed of actors-who-sing, and in the case of Patrick O’Kane’s Woyzeck also gazes balefully. O’Kane could have been staring into the distance whilst rehearsing this production in Dublin and have been unsettling people in Denmark, his look is so penetrating. He combines this with an ability to make Woyzeck’s inarticulate musings seem eloquent, whether in speech or song. Jamie Vartan’s set is an Alp of derelict pianos over which the cast of nine scramble. Having premièred at co-producer the Galway International Arts Festival in July, the London visit of this production by the Irish Landmark company is already over, but it plays the Dublin Theatre Festival in early October and deserves to be more widely seen still.

Written for the Financial Times.