This week, I was delighted to run a phone interview with the playwright, actor, artist, and thinker, Jack Klaff.
Klaff is returning to the London stage next month in Kafka, devised as a 75-minute show.
In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about Franz Kafka, solo work, acting, and Klaff’s South African roots.
Where: Finborough Theatre
When: 11 Jun-6 Jul 2024
Ticket link: https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/kafka/
Tell me about Kafka and how it came about. You’re the writer and performer?
When I started writing plays, I wrote about the Sharpeville Massacre, a very political play that was rejected by the BBC. I was kicking my heels a bit, so did For Your Eyes Only and The Search for Alexander the Great (where I played a eunuch) to get some money.
With £400 in my pocket and nowhere to sleep, I took the play eventually known as Nagging Doubt to Edinburgh, a piece about a series of different characters telling the story of what happened in South Africa in 1960.
Then I wrote a play [Be My – Be My Baby] for myself and my then-girlfriend, which became a solo show when she got a job in the West End.
By the mid-80s, I was writing solo work out of necessity. At the Cheltenham Literary Festival, I was doing some readings and started thinking about who to write about.
I started looking at stories and found Kafka, who loved one-man shows. So this piece was written, not improvised then, in 1983, a hundred years after Kafka was born. It was kind of half-improvised. I played it for about 11 years but haven’t come back to it till now.
In my case, my play, I’m not saying I’m Kafka although I play an actor who plays Kafka, sometimes using ‘I’, sometimes ‘K’ . Kafka loved to have his work read aloud, not just reading on the page.
With Kafka, before us, we have the modern mind, and with a solo piece, we can have one person, a ‘crooked figure’ as Shakespeare would say, make others.
Years ago a critic saw Nagging Doubt and said here we have the murderer and the victim and saw potential for both.
In Kafka we also have in him and in me the eternal tussle between solitude and imtimacy, between a person being on their own and reaching out.
Why bring it back now?
Well, firstly, Kafka died on the 3rd of June 1924 and I open on the 11th of June, which is the 100 anniversary of his burial in Prague.
I knew that a lot of stuff would be done about Kafka and I might sound arrogant and selfish, but I thought you know what I have a lot to say about him.
Secondly, I think it’s interesting to have had a lot to say about him and then to have discovered so much more. I write quite a lot about science the universe, about being human. I find all that very interesting.
Of course, new stories have come out new materials being found, the diaries have been completely redone and published recently so all of that new information and me being older has meant that I think I’ve got something to say.
More importantly, and given that it’s an anniversary and we’re looking at the world as it now stands, I think it’s something that I can really do and make work. I really care about what he had to say.
Do you find it satisfying to create solo work?
As you may know, I have been doing solo work for many, many years now. I’m not going to criticise anyone for doing Shakespeare, Chekhov, or Oscar Wilde, but the solo shows I do are different from those that others do. I’m making theatre, a play.
The work that I do is closely somewhere between Spalding Gray and Anna Deavere Smith. I come from that kind of vintage. I’Il improvise it all and then work it up into theatrical production, which has only got one person.
In one case with the same director (Colin Watkeys), I did a piece in one of the biggest spaces in London, which was The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey.
And so I used the space and the angles In order to create not only a solo piece but a kind of different different scale, different perspective, and different imagery.
So the work is the star, not the actor?
This thing about one person shows. It’s become a thing, but you know it always was. There was a guy called. I’m sure you know, Emlyn Williams and others where they played all the parts, and then there was Peter Sellers in films. I recently played Sellers on a sort of audio drama.
I’m doing something about Tolstoy at the moment as well. He was not interested in the great man theory of history. And in one man shows, you are not one man. There’s a team and togetherness.
The story’s got to be bigger than me. Sometimes people come up to me and say ‘I saw you years ago’ but they can’t remember what I said. Why I wrote Kafka, what I wanted to say is, this story is way, way bigger than me.
Throughout my life it hasn’t been ‘look at me’ but ‘look at this’.
You are playing this show at the Finborough in Earl’s Court. Do you like working in the smaller studio spaces?
I’ve done a lot of plays there and some panel discussions. I’ve done one solo work there. I love the fact that Neil [McPherson] won’t put something on until he’s read the script, so I had to find a version he was happy with.
I do love it. I mean, I’ll go anywhere, but this happens to be a place that rejoices in writing. You know, I’ll go anywhere, and I have indeed done this play elsewhere, I did it in Australia and in Prague.
But, you know, I’m not a big name. Even my friends haven’t heard of me! I’ve never had a full week run in London of my solo work.
I’ve done plays. I was lucky enough to have a festival of my work at the Riverside at one point, but I’ve never had a run of one show that that went on that long, and they offered it to me.
You have a very distinctive acting style. A big personality which always stands out, especially on screen.
That is incredibly kind of you. The thing is, how can I put it? I’m singular, unusual and also a product of the training that I had.
I went to the Bristol Old Vic and my vintage is almost bang in the middle between Jeremy Irons and Tim Pigott-Smith, who who who are older than I, and Dan Day-Lewis, and you can see the kind of differences.
I don’t think they really had a method training, but they kind of became actors who act a certain way. Jeremy Irons and Tim Pigott- Smith in an older generation, really brilliant actors.
But for me, I actually have to beg the sound people and say, listen as soon as I talk like any louder than that, I start sounding like ‘an actor’ and ccan I just be quiet otherwise it’s not gonna be real.
You know, even talking to you even now, I have to modulate my voice, and even with my family. I’ll say, “Good morning, what’s going on?”‘ And they’ll think ‘what’s your problem?!’. My mother said that even when I was a baby, I was very loud.
I have to really quieten everything down because the camera hates acting, so I’ve had to not act both in life and in work for a long, long time.
I’m just at the end of that generation taught to imagine it’s the back of the centre is someone who can’t hear. Well, you can’t do that anymore. It’s not appropriate for this day and age. It really isn’t.
Does being South African inform your work?
What a question! My God. Well, very early on I was lucky enough to be at a theatre called The Space in Cape Town where I was while I was doing credits for my law degree.
I have only seen actors who work with their bodies in Russia and in Africa. It’s getting better in the States. I saw a guy in Russia, at the Moscow, with his character’s entire story in his body. I was lucky enough to see that when I watched particularly black actors in South Africa.
I grew up under apartheid,, pronounced ‘aparthate’ by the way, not ‘aparthide’. In South Africa people lived only to prove Kafka right. You have J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel prize-winning novelist and others. But never mind just Kafka, everything I have written is about power.
I was lucky enough to be in contact with my law professor because I did a tour of America, and I saw what might happen to the constitution and so on.
And he’s in his 80s. His name is John Dugard. He was kind enough to write back and say, “You know, you found justice another way. You found ustice through storytelling.”
In two ways, both in terms of the physicality of the theatre and because of the fact that you can see what happens politically, those two things had an enormous effect on me.
Many thanks to Jack – I look forward to watching and reviewing the show.