Crime and punishment

As I descended, then descended again, then again, to get to my seat in the subterranean, uncomfortable Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, I thought gloomily of the number of miserable evenings I have spent there, and reflected that Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony was probably all too apt a name for what I was about to experience.

As I descended, then descended again, then again, to get to my seat in the subterranean, uncomfortable Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, I thought gloomily of the number of miserable evenings I have spent there, and reflected that Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony was probably all too apt a name for what I was about to experience. Who could read Kafka’s perfect and terrible tale without feeling that there was nothing to add, that any attempt to make it into a drama or musical enterprise would be impertinent and de trop? In the event, this 80-minute realisation, put on by the enterprising Music Theatre Wales, was gripping, though it is still a watering-down of the original.

A major difference is that while Kafka merely reports everything in his invariable deadpan way, including the conversations, leading one to speculate on what reactions he thinks he might elicit, the Visitor, as he is called in this adaptation, is himself semi-narrator as well as semi-participant, and one does feel the action through him. On the first night Michael Bennett, who played this role, sang mainly too loudly, and since he, like the other singing character, the Officer, performed by the excellent Omar Ebrahim, was amplified, he sounded both aggressive and largely incomprehensible. Meanwhile, the onstage string quintet that provides the accompaniment did what Glass’s accompaniments always do, rising only towards the conclusion to a near-frenzy.