BWW Reviews: THE TRIAL, Greenwich Theatre, February 21 2012

Pick up the twentieth century novel The Trial and you'll enter a world that is dark, terrifying and complex - in a word, Kafkaesque (of course). Go to see The Trial on stage, and you'll enter a world that is bright, funny and scatalogical - in a word, Berkoffian (which, if it isn't a word, will be soon).

So this isn't so much Franz Kafka's novel as it is Steven Berkoff's play, even if its jumping off point is the story of the bank clerk who wakes up one day to find himself under arrrest and spends the rest of his life tumbling through layer after layer of bureaucratic and legalistic nonsenses. But that's a good thing, because the book can drag a little and its bleakness can overpower. The only thing likely to overpower anyone in Blackeyed Theatre's production of this now 42 year-old adaptation, is the sheer relentlessness of the black comedy as five actors, always on stage and never still, keep the farce unwinding.

At the centre of the mayhem is bemused, bewildered banker Joseph K (Simon Wegrzyn) around whom four actors play the other twenty parts (and the chorus) in a variety of voices, with a variety of tics, drawing on a variety different methods to torture poor K. Nadia Morgan does a fine job covering women of all ages and er... accessibility, while Derek Elwood's angular frame and bald pate are particularly well-suited to the role of Huld, K's sometime soi disant well-connected lawyer.

The comedy subsides a little in the last twenty minutes, as K's fate becomes clear and tragedy takes over. Though Kafka's work is famously open to multiple interpretations, Berkoff's adaptation draws strong parallels between the law's power to control a man through confusion wrought by a priestly caste of ruthless apparatchiks armed with an impenetrable system and religion's power to do the same with the same tools. I felt Christopher Hitchens would approve - and, as it happens, so do I.

The Trial is at Greenwich Theatre until Saturday 25 February and on tour.