A play never finished? Death comes to take us all in the end, whether we accept it as Marie does or fight it kicking and screaming to the grave. Georg Büchner's brilliant 25-page play has been adapted into a thrilling 90-minute student performance, and for one night more, you too can enter this parallel world lovingly created from electrical tape and desk-lamps. An audience of 11 was not justified for such a novel play, but such is Lent term and such was your Friday night.

Woyzeck is the story of a room. A room that bears witness to a dystopian tale of love, betrayal and regret. Woyzeck is but a lowly soldier, inhabiting the room along with his wife and child, driven mad by a doctor determined to make him exercise relentlessly to S-Club 7 and provide urine samples on demand.

It was a welcome break from the predictable continuity of dullness in Cambridge. Ask yourself, how would you kill a man? Potentially with a sex toy? These guys sure would. The cast was tight and the actors super-talented, particularly Dolores Carbonari (Marie) in her portrayal of an oppressed woman forced to choose between her life and her husband, and Joe Sefton’s (Woyzeck) display of increasing insanity. I’m not sure if this is a compliment but I felt that the Drum Major (Daniel Rasbash) gave welcome relief, especially when he came on with, that’s right folks, a double-ended honky-honk, which both myself and the rest of the audience initially believed to be a ‘baguette’. I can hardly describe what followed. Sex scenes are always tricky terrain for student productions—but this cast on the whole managed to stage them without being overly gratuitous.

Dicks aside, the stage setting was impressive, as were scene transitions. However, I believe the technicians had seen a David Shrigley show and intended to imitate his ‘flickering switch’ piece, resulting in loud and sometimes off-putting scene transitions. The juxtaposition between the severity of content and the S-Club 7 soundtrack (I know…what?) actually worked; you could say it was quite Foucault. The doctor, the madhouse, the camera, was very Foucault.

Despite the innovative staging, the performance room seemed to hold back the cast; the play deserves a bigger space with more technical capacities and more seating. That said, the staging of the play meant that the actors were occasionally obscured from certain viewpoints—a side angle is probably best. Regrettably, blackouts weren’t possible, and the actors were completely visible and lit as they entered the stage and assumed their positions. This was sometimes a bit awkward—and pierced the otherwise powerful momentum of the play.

However, the performance room did have its benefits; the ADC requires a certain kind of actor, a certain kind of acting, but rather, a play performed in The Diamond is afforded a certain leniency for experimentation, a playfulness that one might not find in some of the larger venues in Cambridge.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening—and one I will find difficult forgetting. I would encourage everyone to go; you don’t know if you should laugh, if you do laugh then you don’t know whether you are a good or bad person. Ultimately it leaves you with memories you might someday want to tell your grandchildren.