Kafka, devised and performed by Jack Klaff, defies definition. Not really a play it is part storytelling, part stream of consciousness.
Klaff is an agile and captivating performer, playfully intelligent and briskly confident. He first staged his Kafka in 1983 in the writer’s birth centenary year.
It may seem disjointed on the surface, but Klaff knows Kafka and has much to say about him. He understands him. It’s 100 years since Franz Kafka, thin and tubercular, died at 40.
Many characters briefly appear and just as quickly are gone in a facial expression, a fiddle of a button, a rearranging of hair.
Einstein, Fugard, Kafka’s family, his publisher, Klaff himself. Weaved in with them are stories from Kafka himself, snatches, confidences.
Klaff is physically and vocally adept at telling a tale. The Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into something verminous and unpleasant, but not a beetle, is both horrific and tragic. A dog, a frightening parent, a snatched moment of lust on a beer-stained floor come to life, then vanish.
There are letters of lovers apart, a step on from the boy who sought sport with his namesake jackdaws (jackdaw=kafka), the neighbourhood prostitutes. The deep sensuality, the ease of glancing.
Saint or sexual experimenter? Jew or agnostic? Lonely writer or self-publicist? Hoping for all his papers to be burned, unread, Kafka wished The Hunger Artist to stand for his work, the story of a man who fasted because he found nothing he liked to eat.
A short and busy life, Kafka’s, and hard to pin down in one 90-minute performance. Klaff doesn’t disappear in this show. He can’t. It’s clearly a passion.
His intensity and interest wraps around Orson Welles, director of the film of The Trial, as much as Kafka’s doomed sister, who perished in the Holocaust.
All this in Jaroslav Nemrava’s black box empty space with just one stool as a prop. The lighting by director Colin Watkeys is exquisite and atmospheric.
How best to describe the sensational Kafka and the remarkable Jack Klaff?
Perhaps by quoting his own words about himself when I interviewed him and noted his presence on stage and screen.
“I’m, how can I put it? I’m singular [and] unusual.”
So is Kafka. Singularly brilliant and unusually excellent.
*****
Kafka is at the Finborough Theatre, Earl’s Court, until 6 Jul. Tickets here.
Image credit: Marilyn Kingwill