Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre by Frances Babbage;

Author:Frances Babbage;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472527233
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Kafka/Retz: The Trial

Whereas Punchdrunk’s show took the form of a vast immersive promenade punctuated by private scenes with a few audience members, The Trial by London-based theatre company Retz (later renamed Rift) was shaped almost exclusively around the one-on-one encounter. Retz’s production casts the spectator in a role suggestive of Kafka’s hapless protagonist, Joseph K, charged with a crime whose nature is never fully disclosed and who is unable to penetrate the judicial system to prove his innocence. This interactive adaptation was constructed as two linked live performances, with audiences booking a ticket for Part One, then receiving notice of a Part Two date only once the first was over.50 In Part One, each spectator attends a personal appointment at Shoreditch Town Hall, which results in him ‘chancing’ on a room filled with incriminating documents. The opportunity to examine the material is cut off by a security alarm bell: there follows in swift succession the spectator’s ‘arrest’, a meeting with smoothly unhelpful solicitors, and finally an encounter with K himself in a lonely lock-up, in which Kafka’s protagonist appeals to the spectator desperately for help before being silenced by a guard with a syringe. Part Two, scheduled a few weeks later, is ostensibly the occasion of the spectator’s trial; however, on arrival at the so-called Department for Digital Privacy, situated in another district of East London, he discovers that he has already been found guilty and faces execution. He is directed from one dingy office to another – fictionally trapped inside a circuitous governmental system, where no one can provide help or illumination – and led finally to a peepshow booth that looks onto a torture chamber, inside which another ‘criminal’ is being readied for punishment. Drawing on Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’, this section of the production – more conventionally ‘dramatic’ than what had preceded it – has the uniformed executioner eventually strap himself to the machine of punishment. By this stage of the event, it is implied that the intended victim, a young woman, has escaped her sentence. Yet just when the performance appears to be over she is dragged roughly away by guards and ‘murdered’ in the courtyard below: framed, for the spectator-participants, by the building’s somewhat grimy windows.

Retz’s adaptation of The Trial was inspired by the structure of Kafka’s novel as much as its themes. Felix Mortimer, then the company’s artistic director, had prior experience in immersive theatre, having worked as a designer on Punchdrunk’s Faust and The Masque of the Red Death; he had also explored narrative fragmentation in Retz’s own O Brave New World (2012), a six-part performance installation adapted from The Tempest and staged in a London shop over a six-month period. Mortimer had been considering the possibility of a production shaped around an audience’s journey through multiple interconnected locations, with segments of narrative communicated in each. Kafka’s novel seemed structurally suited to this idea, since the story is told solely through the protagonist’s perspective and the characters K encounters have little interaction with one another.

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