The rocker Nick Cave wrote songs for Büchner’s Woyzeck.

By JON PARELES

When the Icelandic director Gisli Orn Gardarsson approached the Australian rocker Nick Cave to write songs for his new production of “Woyzeck,” it wasn’t because Mr. Cave happened to have a long catalog of songs about murder, madness, obsessive love and death. Those topics all figure in Georg Buchner’s bleak, fragmentary and prophetically modern 1837 play, “Woyzeck,” which was performed by Mr. Gardarsson’s troupe, Vesturport Theater, this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The title character of “Woyzeck,” a credulous Everyman driven to insanity by authority figures and jealousy, wouldn’t be out of place in one of Mr. Cave’s songs. “You can’t help but respond to that story,” Mr. Cave, 51, said by telephone from Chicago, where he was on tour with his band, the Bad Seeds. “It works on the double punch. You’re kind of hit from behind all the time - it sneaks up and hits you.”
In a telephone interview from Dublin, where he was directing and performing in his adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Mr. Gardarsson said he happened to see a concert in Iceland by Mr. Cave and the Bad Seeds and was swept up in the sound, which overlays blunt, three-chord rock with improvisations that can be noisy or rhapsodic and includes the violin of Warren Ellis, a member of the Bad Seeds since 1995 and a collaborator on the songs for “Woyzeck.”
“Witnessing the energy they had onstage, I thought I would like to have a violinist like Warren in the production,” he said. “And then I thought, ‘Hang on - what if I just ask these guys to do the music for “Woyzeck”?’”
Mr. Cave was familiar with “Woyzeck” from the 1979 film adaptation by Werner Herzog. “I have the Herzog version burned in my mind, pretty much,” he said. “That’s an extraordinary thing. It’s so brutal. This version is very, kind of, festive. It’s very different, a complete surprise - physical and youthful and virile.”
“Woyzeck,” performed in English, marked Vesturport’s United States debut. “I often get accused of putting too much fun in my productions, but I don’t know if that’s really a negative criticism,” Mr. Gardarsson said.
His “Woyzeck” takes place on a stage set with a factory’s stylized industrial piping and a row of aquariums representing the river, in which characters splash, grapple, make love and drown. Various performers are airborne, including a violinist modeled on Mr. Ellis, and a soldier, Buchner’s crude Drum Major, who dives into view on a bungee strap.
Mr. Cave and Mr. Ellis came up with stomping rockers, Germanic waltzes and surprisingly tender love songs . Some of the play’s most brutal action is accompanied by “the most beautiful, haunting, liquid sounds,” Mr. Cave said, adding, “I’ve always enjoyed lulling the audience into a false sense of security.”