How do you stage Kafka's The Trial? As expressionist nightmare, political satire, religious allegory? Any approach is possible. But in the hands of Belgrade's Center for Cultural Decontamination, visiting The Gate as part of their East European summer season, it becomes an hour-long piece of physical theatre about the isolation of the oppressed artist.
The company itself, formed in 1993, is a hard-up cooperative anxious to be known as Yugoslavian and to avoid the restrictions of nationalist identity. And one suspects that, back in Belgrade, their work has strong political resonances. Even in the single-sheet translation that accompanies this performance one notices key phrases about "eavesdroppers and snoopers", "corrupt gangs" and the "big organisations that arrest innocent people": phrases that in present day Serbia presumably strike an uneasy chord.
But, in theatrical terms, what hits one is the choreographic precision of Sonja Vukicevic's production. It offers less a literal account of Josef K's arrest and trial than a stylised evocation of Kafka's themes in the manner of the German choreographer Pina Bausch or the Polish painter-director Tadeuz Kantor. It has the former's drilled discipline, the latter's surreal imagery. And it focuses on solitude, persecution and nightmare with little reference to the detailed naturalism of Kafka's novel.
Thus every inch of the stage is covered with newspaper, and around its perimeter lurk lavatory bowls. Each character at the start also seems to be locked into some private obsession. The bony-featured Josef K hits apples with a golf club. A girl in a red slip hugs the walls. Men in bowler hats mechanically wipe their shoes with strips of paper. The hero is then increasingly pursued by the pin-striped chorus who career around the stage on portable toilet seats. Josef K becomes the isolated innocent in a regimented society: even, I suspect, the artist struggling in a world of strident nationalism.
Of course, this is a retrospective vision of Kafka's masterpiece. Every adaptor of the story, from Barrault and Gide to Welles and Berkoff, discovers what he or she needs. Vukicevic, using Mahler's Fifth Symphony as accompaniment, seems to be making a statement about the beleaguered artist: a point reinforced by the final image in which the androgynous hero peels off his grey suit to reveal an unequivocally female form and then, with the rest of the cast, strikes a pose of ironic, grimly smiling deference.
It may not be the whole of Kafka, but it offers a highly disciplined theatrical spectacle.
