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Tonight's setting of Die Soldaten in a WWI stable is so sordid you can almost feel the rats gnawing. Alvis Hermanis was right to warn in a newspaper interview that we would leave the theatre feeling shocked.

The Bayerische Staatsoper presents an ugly, brutal staging of Zimmermann's Die Soldaten – which is exactly as it should be. Barbara Hannigan's Marie steals the show, but the entire cast manage seemingly impossible musical and dramatic feats.

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.