Tudor sensibilities

Kafka, I was informed at school, was a genius. Now that I’ve grown up a bit I can see that my teachers were being typically overgenerous in their estimate of moderate abilities. Kafka was a cartoonist. He’s the Magritte of literature. His outlandish surrealism is so potent that it has succeeded in occupying the imaginations of people who’ve never encountered the work in person. Much of his mystique rests on his name. If he were called King, not Kafka, and Stephen, not Franz, he’d attract far less pious adulation. But he’s all right, Kafka, if you fancy an hour or two of Tremulous Significance.

His short story, In the Penal Colony, has been regularly adapted for the stage and at the Young Vic a Palestinian troupe, ShiberHur, is having a crack at it. The tale has three beats. One: a deranged torturer bleeds prisoners to death with a device that engraves the name of their offence on their flesh. Two: the device is in need of repairs which the new governor won’t stump up for. Three: the torturer realises his beloved box of tricks is heading for the scrapyard so he submits to its severities and expires with the phrase ‘Keep The Faith’ carved on his body. (It’s a pity Spike Milligan never got his hands on this stuff. He’d have turned it into a comedy classic.)

In ShiberHur’s version the atmosphere is overly reverential and the pace sluggish. Certain gestures are particularly cumbersome. When a prisoner escapes he runs around the stage, honking. Strapped into the tattoo-box he bleeds yellow blood, presumably to match the sunflowers growing nearby. But the Arabic language, with its roughness and its velvet, is peculiarly well suited to the story’s harsh rhetoric.