The Trial
THE TRIAL, Sydney Theatre Company Wharf 1, September9-October 16, 2010; a Malthouse Theatre, STC and Thinice commission. Photos by Geoff Busby.
ADAPTING Kafka’s 1925 intensely internal novel for the stage is a bold, even crazy, idea. So thank the lord for bold crazies such as writer Louise Fox and director Matthew Lutton. That it doesn’t entirely come off is a pity, but the ambition is exhilarating and absorbing even when the result eventually runs out of steam, comedy and terror. What is left is a residue of mordant wit and ideas that float to the surface to be nibbled at and tasted, mulled over and examined, hours (days?) later.
The Trial has fascinated and puzzled readers from the beginning and nothing changes in its journey to the stage: Joseph K (Ewen Leslie) is an obscure bank clerk, roughly awakened early one morning by two men who have come to arrest him. His main concern and outrage, at first, is that it’s before breakfast. It’s the kind of detail that is both funny and true of a minor pen-pusher and bean-counter. His imagination is incapable of taking in the implications of arrest for an unspecified crime because his place in the scheme of things is more upset by the detectives’ lack of respect for his routine and need of Weetbix or whatever else might set him on track for a day on a teller’s stool.
There is also something instantly recognisable, in over-governed Australia 2010, in his only slightly pained initial response to the inexplicable arrest, and his unquestioning acquiescence to the whole idea. He has done nothing, he insists, but he also goes along with it, as if the law and its enforcers are an immutable and irresistible fact of life. We see mute acceptance of overwhelming quantities of petty regulations and the pettifoggers who enforce them, as a fact of life under Communism – and other totalitarian bureaucracies that have flourished since. But Australians in the 21st century are so over-regulated with nanny laws we have created a climate of irresponsibility and nihilism where Friday and Saturday nights in the city are now – literally – deadly.
In a sense this society, and Joseph K, are like the fable of the boiling frog: by the time we’ve worked out that the water is dangerously hot, it’s too late. As Joseph drifts further and further into what might be called a Kafkaesque nightmare of competing interests and characters, the solemnity of his plight becomes almost by the by. His alleged offence becomes less important than the fact that he began by accepting the authority of the law enforcers; and that was as good as an admission of guilt. The logic is irrefutable; it’s almost impossible to feel for his position or for the inevitability of the outcome. Perhaps that’s why his inability to fight the consequences, or even to struggle against the cruelty of official indifference, is at first so disconcerting, then so unavoidable. Does he submit to trivial tyranny or does he actually escape it: depends which end of the telescope you look through.
It’s not just a play about politics or social structures, however, and possibly not about them at all. Rather, it lovingly and minutely examines the place of human beings and their behaviour and feelings, when their place, feelings and behaviour are all under threat or stress. Because of that, The Trial as a stage work is very much an ensemble piece with Ewen Leslie at its centre. He plays Joseph K while John Gaden, Peter Houghton, Rita Kalnejais, Belinda McClory, Hamish Michael and Igor Sas take on the multiple roles of his friends and tormentors – some of whom are indistinguishable, one from the other. They are all excellent and a pleasure to watch as they insouciantly negotiate, with clinical skill, the revolving world, doors to nowhere and plywood unbelief of designer Claude Marcos’s set, Paul Jackson’s lighting and the omnipresent soundscape (Ash Gibson Greig, composer and Kelly Ryall, sound design).
The Trial isn’t easy, but it is enthralling. The laughter comes from unlikely places and the absence of a sense of tragedy or conclusion is as it should be, even though it throws you out into the night without “closure”. Yet that in itself is something to chew on later: how false and unsatisfying in the first place is the very idea of being able to attain that flawed premise. There is no closure, no justice and no truth either; but there is poetry and art and that’s the truth.
