Coming up at the Birmingham Rep in October: an arrestingly titled new play from Leo Butler called All You Need is LSD, based on the author’s experiences participating in the world’s first LSD medical trials since the Sixties. I can’t wait to see the results – and duly expect William Hague to cite it in evidence that it’s high-time the Conservative party rethought its legal attitude to acid.

In the meantime, Butler has had his hand in another hallucinogenic adventure: turning Buchner’s nightmarish, fragmentary, unfinished 1836/7 drama into a grandiose play for today, which - in Roxana Silbert’s production (presented with Birmingham International Dance Festival) - harnesses the skills of 100 local community performers.

Based on a soldier of the same name who was beheaded for murdering a widow in a crime of jealous passion in the previous decade, Woyzeck is an impoverished military underling who supplements his income by going on a bizarre medical trial: he’s forced to exist on a diet of peas. Rationing already appears to be affecting his sanity in the first scene where, in this version, Thomas Pickles’ scrawny Woyzeck is found fulminating to a fellow trooper about the proliferation of child porn (“It’s streaming live in Thailand, Slovakia and Rotherham”), barely ducking explosions.

Searching for his sanity: Thomas Pickles as Woyzeck (right) Credit: Graeme Braidwood

When peace is abruptly declared, and the curtain rises on a town square teeming with cheering, Bhangra-dancing celebrants – Birmingham’s Broad Street meets Bollywood by way of Ruritania – it looks as though the stage is set for a clash of cultures. There’s an empty-headed carnival of conformity, versus the self-contained, alienated anti-hero, whose wife (Jalleh Alizadeh’s Marie) joins the loved-up throng, donning glad-rags, parading about with a selfie-stick and falling for the hunky Drum-Major.

Can self-determination exist in such an environment? Is Woyzeck’s increasing derangement a logical response to a world gone, unwittingly, cuckoo? There are some intriguing insights but the sheer number of jostling extras overwhelms matters. You notice stand-out incidental performances (take a bow, Richella McPherson, chillingly exact as a robot-woman); you also notice much enthusiastic amateurism, diminishing the evening's darkening progress to a sickening quietus.

I was left feeling both impressed at the overall collective endeavour – entailing months of rehearsals – and like some experimented-on guinea-pig, craving escape. Wouldn’t it better if artistic directors conceded that intimate classics work best in studio spaces and strove harder to rustle up new epics fit for the 21st century on their daunting main-stages? One for friends and family, methinks.

Until Saturday. Tickets: 0121 236 4455; Birmingham-rep.co.uk