The real Johann Christian Woyzeck (1780-1824) was a jobbing soldier driven mad by an unhappy love-life and the vicissitudes of war, but it was the class system which decreed his beheading for the murder of his unfaithful wife. Georg Buchner, who had inside knowledge of his case, turned his story into a play presenting him as ‘rationally’ paranoid, in that the world really was out to get him. And this was also the premise underpinning Alban Berg’s Wozzeck a century later. All Wozzeck’s encounters with his social superiors – the Captain who accuses him of degeneracy, the Doctor who uses him as a scientific guinea-pig, and the priapic Drum Major who makes off with his wife – are designed to humiliate him beyond endurance.