FringeReview UK 2024
Kafka
Bonne Idée Theatre in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Political, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: Finborough Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Kafka, we’re told, foresaw everything. “This show” quips an audience member: it’s that kind of night. Indeed Jack Klaff’s Kafka, devised, written and performed by him, directed and lit by Colin Watkeys at the Finborough till July 6th, has the gift of eating its own tail.
It’s Klaff’s improvisatory edge, founded on absolute technique and clear-headed text, that finds an exit where none was signposted. Magnificent.
Devised, written and performed by Jack Klaff, Directed and Lighting by Colin Watkeys, Set and Costume Designer Jaroslav Nemrava, Sound Designer Zdena Sedlacek
Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Bonne Idée Theatre Company in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
General Manager Julia Blomberg and Caitlin Carr
Till July 6th
Review
Kafka, we’re told, foresaw everything. “This show” quips an audience member: it’s that kind of night. Indeed Jack Klaff’s Kafka, devised, written and performed by him, directed and lit by Colin Watkeys at the Finborough till July 6th, has the gift of eating its own tail.
Indeed the Klafka is one monster Kafka – or those admirers cos-playing Kafka’s Nostradamus tendencies – might not have predicted. Burling on as Gregor Samsa and some ape reporting to an academy (bearing uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson) Klaff holds the stark window-shuttered stage in Trial/Castle-grey, starkly realised by Jaroslav Nemrava.
Klaff’s known for his hulking energy, but this is, to quote Klaff quoting Einstein on Kafka, not quite possible in the human mind. Even if Kafka and other characters continually refer to their own deaths; or Kafka his own centenary.
Revived for the first time since 1983, Kafka’s 90 minutes firecracks and wisecracks as Klaff takes a vote on audience participation (it’s not a feature) and references the late Mark Fisher (15 at this play’s first outing). Clearly the text, invoking 49 characters, and nudging several others, is updated.
Walter Benjamin who also noted as others did, Kafka’s “purity”, was clear. “Kafka’s world is a theatre” and briefly Klaff inhabits this endless mirror-reflecting intellectual. It’s at points such as these you wish the ferocious carousel of Klaff might still to a point where two individuals stare down the century at each other. Benjamin noted memory is a theatre, and Kafka was obsessed with theatre’s physicality.
The theatre of Kafka takes its departure from Kafka’s 1915 Amerika where the Oklahoma Nature Theater quip declares “everyone is accepted, everyone is welcome” for no pay. There’s The Hunger Artist, the last story Kafka corrected and wanted to preserve. Klaff enjoys a long-drawn sostenuto of hush to realise this, as he does right at the end in The Trial. And Josephine the Singer, an equivocal take on a Yiddish artist.
Kafka was taken with Zionism – Klaff quickly interjects it’s a different one from later iterations. About the only thing we don’t get is the strange detail that Kafka with his last love, Dora Daimant, thought of migrating to the newly-built Tel Aviv and opening a café. He’d manage the accounts. Klaff does remind us that Kafka was hardly touched by news of war, or most artistic events.
Not all characters are shades. For instance early on Alan Bennett upbraids Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, for not burning Kafka’s letters. “He didn’t mean warm them” Kafka-admiring Bennett plausibly quips. Bennett might smile at the way Kafka, who admired “fleshly” women, more specifically reflects that the legs of beautiful Swedish men “cried out to be licked all over.”
Camus repeats himself to prove Kafka is existentialist, and Brecht arrives to sniff: acknowledging Kafka’s insights into power he damns him: “but at heart a bourgeois.”
Meanwhile Mark Fisher’s deployed as a useful corrective to Camus: “I wanted and expected a more straightforward statement of existentialist alienation. Yet there was very little of that in Kafka.“ Klaff plays on this against the lazy manner we imagine Kafka, and clearly over 40 years has refined his approach.
It’s Fisher to a degree who chimes with Klaff’s long snuffle into a burrow, invoking Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog as much as Samsa. “This was not a world of metaphysical grandstanding but a seedy, cramped burrow, whose ruling affect is not heroic alienation but creeping embarrassment.” Klaff, who knows a thing or three about academia, playfully tweaks Fisher but respects him, whilst other unnamed or imagined “intellectuals” riff on pre-post-modern idiocies, or talk of students who find Kafka “triggering”.
To reference all 49 characters might trigger anyone. Long-suffering Hermann Kafka begs us to consider “what it’s like to have a vegetarian for a son”; one who lives at home past 30. Kafka’s lovers and ill-fated sister Ottalie are given voice, friends and posthumous acolytes their place. Later fates aren’t shirked, deaths and the sales of letters – Felice in 1955, who deemed Kafka her saint though she married someone else.
The broken arc of Kafka’s development is nattily, nastily apostrophized by Nabokov: “I never finished a Kafka novel, But then, neither did he.” Nevertheless, Klaff repeatedly brings us back to Kafka’s persona as the genius loci of his centrifuge.
It’s Klaff’s summarising power that slithers us back to the tentacular imaginary he creates. Balling himself up to a whisper or gyrating like a demented pelican, you’re convinced the shaggy incompleteness theory Klaff invokes as Kafka’s project of himself, somehow comes to rest.
It’s a close-run thing: continually returning to Kafka as opposed to tracing an arc. Might Klaff roll a different dice tomorrow? It’s Klaff’s improvisatory edge, founded on absolute technique and clear-headed text, that finds an exit where none was signposted. Magnificent.
