THE TRAP. To 11 August.
London
THE TRAP
by Tadeusz Rozewicz translated by Adam Czerniawski
White Bear Theate To 11 August 2002
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 4pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval
TICKETS 020 7793 9193
Review Timothy Ramsden 28 July
A fevered view of the 20th century through one of its seminal writers: intriguing if only a partial successful realisation of a challenging piece.Alan Bennett clearly hasn't cornered the market in Kafka plays, despite both Kafka's Dick and The Insurance Man. Rozewicz's cruel classic makes Bennett's takes seem cosily provincial. Here, the notoriously frightful Kafka father becomes a steam-fevered projection from cowering Kafka's fearful memory – though Toby Canning might have increased the fearsomeness with a less monotone roar of disapproval at everything, especially his son.
But for Kafka, this whole world's a nightmare, at times lit in garish red and green. First love Felice becomes a caricature, bouncingly testing out a bed for comfort on their pre-nuptial shopping-trip for domestic furnishings while his new novel and boiling inner soul – or hot-wired brain cells – occupy Franz. Later, socially unsuitable beloveds pass through the action like softer fragments of the nightmare.
Father apart, Franz was a child in a female household of mother and giggly sisters. These girls, historically, survived their brother to die in Nazi concentration camps: evidently a form of the nightmare through which Rozewicz views the Czech writer. It is expressive, but clouds the question. Is the fearful child, and later the cowed dog in a corner which Franz becomes, a portrait of an extreme individual psyche or of a heightened human sensitivity maddened by brutal society? And is that brutality the heavy tramp of totalitarian boots or the heavy weight of unimaginative bourgeois respectability?
Is the wardrobe which is first seen on Felice's shopping-trip and which ominously re-appears at various times - a massive yet insubstantial set piece (a two-dimensional drawing on a canvas flat, at one point ripped from its frame) - a premonitory gas-chamber or merely dead-end domesticity, a life where the notebook and the novel are to be kept for convenient moments?
The acting is often stretched, though Tanya Hossick captures the bouncing bourgeois soul of Felice and Paul Lewis provides stability as Franz's friend Max Brod. And it's by no means an easy view, partly because such nightmare extremes are easy to do but hard to do well, partly because of the specifically Polish experience inherent in the play. Still, at least it's on stage, a rare enough repertoire-expanding experience in British theatre today.
Franz/Child: David Sayers
Felice/Valli/Cobbler's Wife: Tanya Hossick
Max/Salesman: Paul Lewis
Grete/Elli/woman in the Street: Sadie McMahon
Ottla/Little Soul/Cobbler's Child: Imogen Rands
Cobbler/Barber/Executioner/Remover: Christopher John
Mother/Busker: Margaret Moore
Josie/Vicky/Zenka/Executioner/Remover: Dagmar Doring
Father/Gentleman at Barber's: Toby Canning
Director: Julek Neumann
Designer: David Roberts
Lighting: Robin Snowdon
Costume: Jan Hassan
2002-07-29 10:03:46