A FASCINATING and frustrating new production of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, directed by Richard Jones, opens with the stage rising to become a ceiling. Below that, a black conveyor belt stretches from one edge of the stage to the other. The audience at the Young Vic sits, like a tribunal, on either side of this travelator, as a quintessential 20th-century nightmare unfolds in the middle. It's on the morning of his 30th birthday—his 35th in this adaptation—that Josef K wakes to discover he is under arrest for committing an unspecified crime from which, he gradually learns, it is impossible to defend himself.
Kafka wrote "The Trial" in 1914, but the novel wasn't published till 1925, the year after his death. Mr Jones has moved Kafka’s pre-war world of frock-coats, inkwells and candle lamps forward more than half-a-century giving us answerphones, record players and wheelie-bins. The free-ranging adaptation by Nick Gill, a playwright, also conjures up characters, rearranges scenes and updates the language of officialese (“Your trial is important to us”). But all this inventiveness struggles against the mechanical relentless of Miriam Buether’s design, which from the opening moment locks down the direction of travel. There will be no sudden reversals here.
Except for those who had arrived with high hopes. Rory Kinnear won the Olivier award for Best Actor last year for his superlative turn as Iago in Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Othello”. Mr Kinnear’s Josef K is a sympathetically flawed Everyman—balding, sweaty, pinstriped—who gets caught up in the never-ending and labyrinthine process. The performance is extraordinarily quick-witted and precise, but Kafka’s plot being what it is, there are only so many variations on mounting anxiety and despair that even Mr Kinnear can find.
His efforts to prove his innocence are thwarted by Sian Thomas as the preeningly self-confident lawyer, expert in ingratiating herself over a breakfast croissant with the upper echelons of the Lower Courts. In a nice touch, Hugh Skinner, the gormless intern from "W1A" (the BBC's satire about itself) plays K's main rival at work—one Kafka-esque world merging with another. Most of the actors play two or three roles, morphing in an almost dreamlike way. This is taken to virtuoso lengths by Kate O’Flynn, who plays six young markedly different female parts—as if, in K’s eyes, sexual desire is always endlessly shape-shifting.
"The Trial" sits halfway between Jarndyce and Jarndyce in "Bleak House" and Big Brother in "1984" and it’s the Dickensian and Orwellian scenes that work best. The lunacy of bureaucratic form-filling is captured by Sarah Crowden as the information officer and Richard Cant as her assistant as they face down ranks of tweedy figures fumbling through mountainous stacks of bright yellow papers. Steven Beard’s magistrate has lank strands of greasy hair, a grimy grey t-shirt and sandals. Another grotesque figure, the defendant Block (Skinner again), has been reduced to behaving like an obedient dog, crouching on a table and sticking his tongue out, while his lawyer (Sian Thomas) pats him on the head and says: “Who’s a good client?”
The script makes Kafka’s point graphically: it's clear there are two ways that the state can entrap the individual. The first is by placing a couple of guards at the front door. The second is through language. As words are drained of meaning, the speeches themselves become the system’s most effective means of imprisonment. Kinnear’s K reaches the point where the word “innocence” has become “just a funny sound”. In Jones’s production, it’s only the sound effects themselves—the bird song, the dogs barking, the whiplashes—that end up standing for exactly what they are.
"The Trial" is on at the Young Vic theatre in London until August 22nd
