BWW Reviews: KAFKA V KAFKA, Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, January 20 2012

Though neither party descends to the deathless phrase, "I don't believe what I'm hearing", there's plenty of that soap opera staple - inter-generational conflict - in Howard Colyer's play based on Franz Kafka's long, ultimately unsent letter to his father, Hermann, written in the aftermath of World War I. With Franz coughing throughout, the shadow cast by his death from tuberculosis and his family's later annhilation in The Holocaust, is never far away either.

If that sounds grim, it's because this is a serious work honouring its principal character with a high-minded aesthetic - the Magritte-inspired set and props, shadow-throwing lighting and eeriely atmospheric music are all beautifully conceived and executed. The play circles the two men locked in a trial of strength (literally, at one point, across a table - see here) each gifted by an extreme power. Alas those powers do not complement each other - they destroy each other. Hermann's is the confidence, the chutzpah, of the self-made man who has bent the world to his will and succeeded; Franz's is the torture that comes from genius, the insight granted only to a guilt-ridden intellectual whose will is shattered by a world that engulfs his fragile sensibility. The suffocating tension is occasionally broken by references to Metamorphisis and The Trial, allusions that flare in your mind's eye, then disappear as quickly as they came.

As Franz, Jack Wilkie is ill and anguished, scribbling and scribbling on paper as long, thin and delicate as himself, trying to find his own writing version of Freud's talking cure to exorcise his demons. Gareth Pilkington's Hermann captures the testosterone-fuelled energy of the country-boy who made it in the city who is now fading, but not fading as quickly as he doth protest. Hermann's wife, Julie (Jean Apps) plays peacemaker from time to time and shows that the only accommodation one can make with a man like Hermann is to submit. It is an accommodation that Franz neither would, not could, make. Ottla (Ivy Corbin) is a silently beautiful sister for Franz who says little, but shows that there is more than one way to become a victim of a Father-Tyrant. She also delivers the hideous, heart-rending epilogue, describing how the Kafkas, like so many of Prague's Jews, became victims of a Fatherland-Tyrant, whose worshipping of the power of will multiplied the damage done by Hermann's worshipping of that same power, by millions.

At 70 minutes without an interval, Colyer makes demands, but reasonable ones, on his audience who are left with much to think about in terms of the power relations within their own families. They also leave with a desire to grapple again with the dense prose and nightmarish vision of a writer whose work grows more, not less, relevant with every passing year.

Kafka v Kafka continues at The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre until Saturday 4 February.

Photo Anna Nguyen.