KAFKA'S DICK. To 31 May.
Watford.
KAFKA’S DICK
by Alan Bennett.
Palace Theatre To 31 May 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Mat 21, 28 May 2.30pm, 24, 31 May 3pm.
Audio-described 31 May 3pm
Captioned 15 May.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
TICKETS: 01923 225671.
www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 May. 08
Amusing production simplifies complex comedy.
Man, writer and adjective: Franz Kafka was all three, though he wouldn’t have been if he’d stuck to writing insurance policies. There’s a delightful irony in insurance being the day job of an author who’s the byword for insecurity. Yet his nature’s chiefly known because his friend Max Brod broke his promise to destroy Kafka’s manuscripts after the writer’s death.
Alan Bennett’s play brings Brod inexplicably and Kafka as if by magic, to a modern suburban English home: the archetype of security, though anxiety lurks amid the stagnant marriage of insurance-man Sydney and ex-nurse Linda. With Brod-like implacability both assure their dad they’re not carting him off to a home (which they are).
Brod falls for Linda, who takes to Kafka, thereby annoying Sydney, a bit of a specialist on his fellow insurance-seller’s life. Despite the many books Sydney has on Kafka’s works, it’s the life that preoccupies him. And, as so often, this becomes salacious celebrity tittle-tattle.
Emphasising that family life, the cradle of security, can be a nest of anxiety, Kafka’s own dad arrives, blackmailing his son into creating a more positive spin on their tormented relationship by threatening to reveal the precise size of the titular organ. If that points to the crudity in Bennett’s title, it points also the way we eagerly demean the famous.
Though Benedict Sandiford is vocally effortful as Brod, he’s a live, wiry presence and there’s good acting all round, especially from Victoria Carling and Paul Clayton But director Sarah Esdaile corsets Kafka in a concept, paralleling him with Stan Laurel. It limits Adrian Lukis to a piping voice and a puzzled expression. And it’s a false analogy; Kafka was nervousness through-and-through. Laurel’s screen manner concealed a purposeful, businesslike reality - Tom McGrath’s Laurel and Hardy has been revealing this around the country.
Neil Irish’s set of towering book-shelves detracts from the suburban domesticity; Sydney isn’t a scholar but a dilettante at danger from “a little learning” (the Penguin Books coffee-mugs are a neat touch). Still, it’s an enjoyably thoughtful play – about Kafka, about the English - in an efficient, amusing production.
Franz Kafka: Adrian Lukis.
Max Brod: Benedict Sandiford.
Sydney: Bruce Alexander.
Linda: Victoria Carling.
Father: an Lindsay.
Hermann Kafka: Paul Clayton.
Director: Sarah Esdaile.
Designer: Neil Irish.
Lighting: Malcolm Rippeth.
Composer: Simon Slater.
Movement: Joyce Henderson.
Assistant director: Rania Jumaily.
2008-05-15 01:17:27