D: Oliver Frljić
It’s certainly the right time for the parable of The Trial, the unfinished work of Franz Kafka. Josef K, living in a supposedly free country, receives a knock on his door and finds himself in a legal process that he cannot escape – a scenario that has resonance with too much contemporary circumstance, both here in Germany and the world at large. However, whether Oliver Frljić’s theatre of images and intensity is the right medium for this message is a question left for the spectator to answer.
Frljić’s choices to direct his actors toward caricature and Gorki’s typical avant-garde clowning aptly heighten the absurdity of Kafka’s tale, but they also serve to unmoor the story from structuring irony of the source’s sober prose. Actor Edgar Eckert commits to playing a cowed Josef K, but risks turning the character into a total nebbish.
The set designer, Igor Pauška, attempts to ground the work with such inventions as a hanging grate that consigns the stage (and half of its actors) to a shadowy underworld. It’s an apt metaphor for the long cultural history under whose penumbra this adaptation sits – especially that of Orson Welles‘s 1962 cinematic masterpiece. But in the moments when it is wholly itself, as when the ensemble, in a madcap moment, starts to wheel around a blindfolded statue of Lady Justice on an IV drip, its critique of a world where integrity is on life support is as clear as day.
- Sep 17, Maxim Gorki Theater, German with English surtitles
