Kafka’s Dick

By Alan Bennett

Directed by Sarah Esdaile

Palace Theatre, Watford

Playing until Saturday 31 May

How much privacy is a creative artist entitled to claim? Particularly when that artist is
recognised as a genius? That is the issue underpinning Alan Bennett’s 1986 play, given an
exceptionally effective new production by Sarah Esdaile as the third of the Watford
Palace Theatre’s centenary season’s productions.

Being a Bennett play, of course there’s much more to it than that. There are echoes of GB
Shaw in the epilogue and the characterisation of Kafka’s father Hermann as a Czech
variation of Andrew Undershaft. There’s a sense of tragedy as well as dazzling wit and a
kaleidoscope of literary and historical allusions – illusions, as well. You’re left wondering
what on earth can come next. And come it does.

Neil Irish has designed a towering book-lined set that plays as many tricks on the
audience as the drama itself, with considerable assistance from lighting designer Malcolm
Rippeth. What they’ve created is an actor in its own right, physically dwarfing the
frustration of the lives it shrouds but doing it with enough grace to allow those lives to
dominate in their own private spheres.

Tall and thin, Adrian Lukis offers us equal insight into the difficult personal and
professional nature of Kafka as well as his vulnerability. Bowler hat topping an assembly
of not-quite-fitted black suiting, he has the air of one of those silent-film clowns due to
experience a whole sequence of uncomfortable horrors at the hands of men much more
worldly wise than they can ever be.

Contrast that quivering uncertainty with Benedict Sandiford as Max Brod, the friend who
should have burned all Kafka’s unpublished work but found his literary executorship
judged far more important than his own writing. Sandiford gives us a worm perhaps, but
one with a neat way of turning into a viper.

The modern home into which these two too-too solid ghosts intrude has Bruce Alexander
bubbling and bumbling as Sydney, the insurance man with literary longings. It’s a finely
detailed performance which balances the uselessness of the man with the hopefulness of
his vision. His wife, who has her own aspirations, is played by Victoria Carling with just
the right blend of earth mother and frustrated intelligence.

There are two fathers in this play. One is Hermann Kafka (Paul Clayton), a man so set on
a collision course with his only son that he seems to sum up the whole of human history
in one person. Clayton is not afraid of the grand gesture in association with a voice to
match. Sydney’s father, zimmer-framing his way to an old people’s home – that
contemporary equivalent of the sanatorium for the tubercular and incurable, is gently
sketched in by Ian Lindsay.

Reviewed by Anne Morley-Priestman for Theatre World Internet Magazine

/ends
14 May 2008
447 words