From the original programme: "Woyzeck was written in 1837 by Georg Buchner, a 23 year old German revolutionary and science lecturer at the University of Zurich, who died before he could finish the play. The Drama was forgotten and rediscovered only decades later. It exercised tremendous influence on Naturalism and Expressionism as well as on Bertold Brecht and has even been proclaimed as a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd. Alban Berg's opera version is regarded  as a modern classic. Woyzeck the play has been hailed as the first modern tragedy because of both its open dramatic form and its grotesque content. Woyzeck the man is the lower class tragic hero, long before Arthur Miller's "Salesman", and the plot is based on an actual murder case of the time. A film version of Woyzeck by Werner Herzog was shown in Christchurch recently. The version shown by the German drama workshop production is an original adaptation (in English) of Buchner's fragment."