Kafka said he wanted his work to be destroyed after his death. After watching The Trial, you can see why. Who would want this afterlife? A perky but flat adaptation by Nick Gill, a brutal staging by Richard Jones. A work of threat and mystery made bland and explicit.
The stage looks set for dramatic reinvention with a mighty design by Miriam Buether. Co-opted as snoopers, the audience face each other across the action. An orange ceiling, from out of which is cut a giant keyhole, hovers above the stage. It lifts up to reveal a conveyor belt, which brings on sparse interiors. It is all so orange and brown that we might be in for a satire on 60s taste, a trial of interior design.
The updating permits one good joke. An answering machine assures the hero that “your trial is important to us”. Otherwise, it is a downward drift. Kafka can work on stage, as the Icelandic company Vesturport proved with their dazzling acrobatic version of Metamorphosis. The Trial might seem a good theatrical candidate. Kafka’s novel is not a piece of fine writing: it is a series of eddying scenes, galvanised by unnamed fear, a tautologous crime, in which the protagonist is accused “of guilt”. It can be read all at once as a prescient study of totalitarianism, sexual frustration and paternal repression.
But not here. The Gill-Jones version, which begins with K watching the virtuoso Kate O’Flynn perform the first of several tarty fandangos, is barely alarming and not at all far-reaching. Our “hero” is simply haunted by sexual skirmishes. True, Kafka’s novel has more sexual pouncing in it than is often allowed. But it is the shape-changing, all-embracing, ungraspable nature of the cloud that haunts K that makes the persecution so memorable.
More damaging are the soliloquies. Kafka’s prose marches with a sometimes leaden formality through outside events and K’s head. Interior and exterior are fused; everything is bathed in one chill light. Here, Gill supplies peeps into K’s mind, with speeches made up of a topsy-turvy babbling. It is as if Stanley Unwin were imitating Beckett in excitable gulps. Or someone was developing a new dialect of Elvish: “Eliminate ee all ambiguum, all doubten motive.”
Stranded in this are some strong actors – Steven Beard, W1A’s intern Hugh Skinner and Sian Thomas among them – who are made to perform as pop-up grotesques. They often have extreme hair, either ultra-groomed wigs or ultra-lanky locks. And there is Rory Kinnear. Many actors could pull off the explosive writhing and barking. Not so many could do so while still looking like a bank clerk. Kinnear ignites terrifically into rage and despair but he is most distinctive when most contained. His reactions – a wince, a snicker – are slight, ambiguous expressions not often seen on stage. Making the paralysis of discomfort truly physical, he looks as if he is trying not to sneeze or itching to chase an unseen spider from his features. His face is a far more intriguing spectacle than the capers around him.
