The Trial

by Franz Kafka adapted by Nick Gill

seen at the Young Vic on 12 August 2015

The play is not, of course, by Franz Kafka - it is a rather free adaptation from the famous novel. It is directed by Richard Jones and features Rory Kinnear as Joseph K, with eleven other actors taking all the subsidiary roles, in particular Kate O'Flynn playing some six significant females in Joseph's life, as imagined by Nick Gill.

The first four rows of the audience on either side of a long transverse stage are reached through corridors of flimsy plywood, and each row has an equally makeshift shelf in front of it, rendering everyone sitting there as putative jurors in the eponymous trial. The acting space itself, designed by Miriam Buether, has two parallel belts which are frequently in motion to allow various props and settings to appear and disappear as required. Scenes are often framed by doors at either end, which are free-standing and are often slammed loudly. The effect is nightmarish, especially as it gives rise to the thought that all significant spaces for Joseph K are essentially alike in their configuration. The phrase 'everything belongs to the Court' begins to have a physical as well as a metaphorical resonance.

Rory Kinnear gives a strong performance as the confused and increasingly desperate Joseph K. He has the difficult task of speaking his private thoughts in a curious language which is a kind of babyish English with Latin inflections, so that it is not always easy to understand. However, the general sense is plain, and the style becomes more familiar as the play proceeds. In his interactions with others, his initial sardonic assurance that he can control the situation quickly crumbles under the intense bureaucratic invasion of his life; his work suffers; his dress sense collapses; he becomes more prone to grasp at straws; he is finally unable to resist his fate, and unable even to complain any more that his fate has not been explained to him.

One suggestion made to him by an appallingly self-assured lawyer (a brittle power-dressed Sian Thomas ironically called Mrs Grace) is that he should document his life explaining and justifying all his shortcomings. Since it is impossible to know on what grounds he has been arrested, it is best to prepare a defence against any accusation that might possibly be made. In this play, most of the episodes which Joseph K speaks aloud about relate to sexual matters (spying through keyholes and the like as a young adolescent, for example), and there is an indication that he visits lap-dancers. This is all somewhat more prominent than what is presented in the original novel, where most of the attention is on the perplexities of his present situation rather than the embarrassing fumblings of his teenaged self. 

The sheer implacability of the court procedure is explored here, but perhaps the mounting terror of the situation is not given due weight because of the slightly knockabout way in which it is revealed. The court officials at the first hearing are distractingly grubby and unprepossessing, but the full impact of the notion that later sessions of the case are proceeding in Joseph's absence because he declared he had said enough is rather thrown away. While the situation is, in one sense, absurd - and hence ripe for absurdist dramatic treatment - it also remains extremely dangerous, an angle not sufficiently emphasised here.

Missing from this adaptation is the great parable of the doorkeeper, and the long exposition of its possible meanings. It is arguably too difficult to dramatise, being so static, but its absence somehow reduces the sense of entrapment which is so essential to the novel. In the play, the fatal logic of the situation, and the sense that is both universal and yet exquisitely designed just for Joseph K is not so clearly expressed, even though the individual vignettes are brilliantly done.

If one enters the auditorium as a 'juror', there are a few small panels on the plywood walls featuring misdemeanours for which young people have been prosecuted (as young as four), with an implication that the law is often too heavy-handed. These are disquieting; but Kafka was careful not to tie his fable to any particular transgression.