Kafka

11th June – 6th July 2024

There are countless ways you could engage with the glorious and terrifying world of Franz Kafka this summer. He died on 3 June 1924 and the centenary of his passing is being marked by a flurry of activity from exhibitions and new translations to radio shows and video games. The wheels of a great public event are in motion. Yet however you choose to engage, if you choose to engage at all, you will be doing so alone. With Kafka—master of alienation, of the solitary life lived in bureaucratic hell—there is simply no other way.

Perhaps this provides one justification for Kafka, in which writer and performer Jack Klaff takes on his subject as a single figure on an empty stage. In a play he has resurrected 41 years after its first staging (during the centenary of Kafka’s birth), Klaff portrays in the area of 50 different characters. While this may sound like a folly of self-indulgence and a recipe for incoherence, we can find another justification for the project’s existence in that Kafka himself was a champion of the one-man show, having arranged a series of solo performances in Prague for his actor friend Jizchak Löwy. But in any case, the fact is there is an authenticity underlying Klaff’s play which saves it from the charge of vanity and, with one important proviso, it is a play that does cohere.

“Klaff’s skill in holding the audience’s attention as he shifts between characters is to be commended”

Klaff’s play is for the already converted, the Kafka devotee. If you are coming to him afresh, looking for a way into his oeuvre, you’re likely to leave nonplussed. My companion for the evening, a highly educated and decorated clinician, one who is yet to be drawn by Kafka’s allure, found the work less a majestic study of alienation than just plain alienating. I’ve been trying to convince him to read The Trial or The Metamorphosis. Klaff’s play hasn’t helped.

For my part, I fell under Kafka’s spell long ago. And while being no expert, I’d read enough to be able to follow, more or less, as the dense yet fragmentary plot unfolded. Klaff’s skill in holding the audience’s attention as he shifts between characters is to be commended (on this point, even my companion agreed). He is no great impressionist but has no need to be. Most characters, historical and fictional, are introduced quickly with “I am Franz Kafka”, “I am Gregor Samsa”, “I am Max Brod”, etc. It’s as simple as could be and works perfectly.

Klaff presents some of the most illustrious moments of Kafka’s body of work, from the parable of the man from the country, waiting for years at the gate for access to the Law, to Gregor in agony, a rotting apple lodged in his inflamed back. And we are given so much more. The play incorporates sections of Kafka’s letters, correspondence from friends and lovers, and critique, usually flattering, from Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, David Foster Wallace and others. 

The play amounts to a deeply personal homage, written and delivered by a connoisseur. This will be off-putting to some and, for the neophyte, perhaps renders the play inaccessible. But for the Kafka fan, the play is an engrossing spin through the kaleidoscope of his life and work. It is likely to teach you one or two things you didn’t know too. Regardless, Franz Kafka’s voice has always been that of the solitary hero lost in an incomprehensible world. Perhaps the only way to honour him is through personal homage, as Klaff convincingly does here.

Marc Chamberlain