Cairns has found himself a bit of an expert on describing Wozzeck. “My short pitch is: life sucks, everyone’s a jerk,” he says with an only slightly cynical laugh. It’s maybe an incomplete description, but not inaccurate. Based on the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, left unfinished at his 1837 death, Berg’s Wozzeck is the grim story of what war does to everyday people. And while the titular character seems to take blow after blow – shell-shock from combat, medical abuse from a Mengele-adjacent Doctor, being cuckolded by his common-law wife Marie – Cairns’s character, the Drum Major, is among those who thrive in the post-war state depicted onstage.
“Everyone’s living in this world that’s miserable and trying to get by,” Cairns describes. “Certain people are getting to abuse the…