There is a clue about what is to come before Proper Job theatre company’s staging of Franz Kafa’s The Trial begins, when lead musician Leighton Jones tinkles Mack the Knife on a keyboard as the audience filters in.
The Kurt Weill composition, written for Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, is a witty foreshadowing of the alienation that lies ahead. The problem here is that the Verfremdungseffekt or “distancing effect” that Brecht first described is overwhelming to the degree that it becomes impossible to connect with the plight of the hero. Without emotional investment in the protagonist, why would we care about anything happening here?
Of course the source material – the story of a man who awakes on his 30th birthday to find himself arrested for an unidentified crime – is meant to be discombobulating, but in a piece of theatre we need at least some anchor we can hold on to. Here everything slips through the grasp, as outre song and dance routines, seemingly meaningless choreographed moments of physical theatre and repetitious actions serve only to baffle.
In Chris O’Connor’s adaptation of Kafka’s unfinished novel, a giant screen watches over us and relays messages that “Walden cares for all”; the Big Brother-esque Walden presumably being the omnipotent organisation behind the arrest of Josef K. Any contemporary resonances with all-pervasive social media, governmental surveillance and Priti Patel-accompanied dawn raids are left for us to draw.
As the action progresses in a disjointed manner it’s difficult to grasp a sense of the overall piece: a scene might feature a song which then gives way to a comic two-hander, but you couldn’t guess what comes next. Nothing hangs together.
There is a lot to support here. O’Connor is an interesting young writer whose previous work has always been intelligent and unflinching, and Proper Job has committed to developing six young creatives from the north who are taking part in this production. As Josef K, Ali Michael is very watchable and O’Connor peppers his script with some cracking jokes, but the production needs a unifying principle and a stronger imperative for us to invest.
