It may be that Franz Kafka's novel, Der Prozess, published posthumously and unfinished, is intractable when adapted for the stage. Sometime around 1960 Cyril Cusack staged a hopelessly undramatic and deeply self-indulgent, five-hour version in the Olympia as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival and audiences stayed away in their droves.
On Monday a theatre company called Globex, new to this reviewer, presented a mercifully concise adaptation by Niall O'Driscoll and Oliver Butler which came much closer to the theatrical mark but still remained largely devoid of drama.
Joseph K is woken from his bed before dawn by three men in dark clothes who might be police inspectors. Told that he is under arrest, JK is unable to elicit what the charges are. Appeals for help or clarification to his landlady, Mrs Grubach, and his neighbour, Miss Burstner, and some of his office colleagues mysteriously brought into the room by the men in dark clothes, he can conclude only that he is under some enigmatic threat unclear to him and, maybe through an uneasy fear, unclear to them also.
Further appeals to others, including various Court functionaries and hangers-on, serve only to increase his sense of oppression.
Close to the end, on meeting the priest who would hear his confession, it becomes vaguely possible to believe that the real trial here was between Joseph K and what he perceives as his own guilt for he knows not what and, when he protests against the Court, he is ceremoniously killed.
The production comes across with all the hallmarks of an ambitious undergraduate presentation: moments of highly creative imagination intermingled with awful failures of stagecraft. The ambition is much greater than is the ability of the director, Niall O'Driscoll, or his young company to achieve what they seek.
The voices generally lack projection and are too often rendered totally inaudible by an eclectically-selected musical sound track. Some apparently good visual images are set almost at naught by a very inadequate and murky lighting plot. The setting is simple but effective (apart from the lighting) but clear sight-lines for the audience are not always maintained.
Yet what has come to be known as the Kafkaesque feeling, that incomprehensible anxiety and threat, comes across well for the most part and even some of Kafka's quietly ironic humour is clearly evident. Globex offers promise, unfulfilled in this production.
